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Chapter 1 The Condemnation of Galileo (1633) 7 On 22 June 1633, at the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, the Inquisition concluded the trial of Galileo by pronouncing a sentence that condemned him for various transgressions. The sentence was immediately followed by the culprit’s abjuration, in which he retracted previous opinions and actions. Galileo’s beliefs and conduct were found to have violated certain prescriptions that had been decided upon in earlier developments . Some of these prescriptions had been announced in the antiCopernican decree by the Congregation of the Index on 5 March 1616. This decree had been later clarified in a warning dated 15 May 1620. To begin to understand the condemnation of Galileo and the controversy it generated, we must examine these four defining documents. 1.1 “Vehemently Suspected of Heresy”: The Inquisition’s Sentence (1633) For centuries the text of the Inquisition’s sentence was a collector’s piece, but now it is easily available1 and does not need to be reproduced. It is, however , seldom analyzed with the care it deserves. The opening lines indicated that the sentence was being issued by a committee of ten cardinals who made up the department of the Catholic Church officially labeled the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, and more commonly known as the Holy Office, or more simply the Inquisition. Although the Inquisition had existed in various forms since at least 1252,2 in 1542 Pope Paul III had reorganized it primarily by replacing the single grand inquisitor with a committee of cardinals and a complex bureaucratic apparatus of prefect, secretary, assessor, commissary, notary, prosecutors, and consultants. In Rome, the cardinal- inquisitors usually met two or three times a week. One of these meetings was usually presided over by the pope, as was fitting for a department regarded as the single most important administrative unit of the Church. Moreover, the decisions reached when the pope was not present normally had to be ratified by him; and in this particular case, the pope was directly involved in the proceedings. Nevertheless, the Inquisition and the pope were distinct, and the decisions of the former could not be formally equated with those of the latter. In short, Galileo was being condemned neither by a formal decree of the pope nor by the whim of a lone inquisitor, but by a collective body that was the supreme tribunal of the Catholic Church. The substantive part of the sentence began by going back to the year 1615 and describing several charges advanced against Galileo then.3 Five distinct accusations were mentioned: (1) holding the truth of the earth’s motion; (2) corresponding about this doctrine with some German mathematicians ; (3) publishing a book titled Sunspot Letters that explained the truth of the doctrine; (4) answering scriptural objections against the doctrine by elaborating personal interpretations of Scripture; and (5) writing a letter to a disciple containing various propositions against the authority and the correct meaning of Scripture. In accordance with standard inquisitorial practice and with the purpose of a sentence, no names or details were mentioned. Today we know that these charges had been made by two Dominican friars : Niccolò Lorini, who had written a letter of complaint to a cardinalinquisitor , and Tommaso Caccini, who had made a personal appearance before the Roman Inquisition.4 We also know who Galileo’s German correspondents were: Johannes Kepler, the mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor, who in 1610 had written a public letter endorsing the telescopic discoveries announced in Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger; and Christopher Scheiner, the Jesuit mathematician with whom Galileo had exchanged the sunspot letters in 1612–1613. We know, too, that the disciple to whom Galileo had (on 21 December 1613) written a refutation of the scriptural objection to Copernicanism was Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine friar and a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa and later at Rome.5 And indeed, as suggested in the last two charges, there were two ways in which Galileo had replied to the objection that Copernicanism must be wrong because it contradicts many scriptural passages: first, even if Copernicanism contradicts Scripture, that is irrelevant because Scripture is not a philosophical (or scientific) authority, but an authority only on questions of faith and morals; and second, it is questionable whether Scripture contradicts Copernicanism any more than it contradicts the Ptolemaic system, for an analysis of the relevant scriptural passages shows that they are...

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