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4 | The Pious Heretic
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❍ 4 THE PIOUS HERETIC Man has weav’d out a net, and this net throwne Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne. . . . —John Donne f the many conflicts between religion and science throughout history, none has received more attention than the clash between Galileo and the Catholic Church during the first half of the seventeenth century. The events that led to the famous trial of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 have inspired countless debates among historians and theologians alike. Even as late as 1982 Pope John Paul II called for a deeper study of the issue “to remove the barriers to a fruitful relation of science and faith that the Galileo affair still raises in many minds.” And finally, in 1992, John Paul II officially reversed the Church’s condemnation of Galileo. The pope’s open-mindedness was completely foreign to the Church of three centuries before. In those days, as we have seen in the last chapter, the schism between the Catholic and Protestant faiths was engulfing Europe in bloody conflict. The medieval supremacy of the Catholic Church was crumbling fast, together with its Aristotelian view of the world. These were critical times for the survival of the Catholic Church, and no challenge to its power was to pass unanswered. The Inquisition was operating at full force, spreading fear in the minds of those who dared contradict the word of the Holy Fathers. As an additional weapon against the mounting O heresy, the Church in 1540 organized its own militia, the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit order, which was to be engaged in the spreading of Catholicism across the world. As for matters of Christian theology, the Council of Trent (1545–63) stipulated that no interpretation of the Scriptures differing from that sanctioned by the Holy Fathers was to be tolerated. The burning of philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1600 is a sad example of the Church’s war against religious deviation. Bruno’s problems with the Church were caused more by his theological heresies than by his belief in an infinite Universe, populated by infinite suns like ours. His cosmological speculations and support for Copernicanism were indeed far ahead of his time and mark a true departure from medieval thought. But to the Church, his views on transubstantiation , the Trinity, and the substantiality of the human soul were far more dangerous. Bruno died an impenitent apostate, forever a symbol of the courage of the human spirit against blind censorship. Although Galileo is commonly represented as one of the greatest martyrs in the fight for freedom of expression, and the Church as the intolerant villain, the truth is more complex. When Galileo launched his personal crusade to disprove the geocentric model of the cosmos, the Church’s position concerning the arrangement of the heavens was somewhat flexible. Copernicus’s book was not put in the Index until 1616, over sixty years after it was published, and even then it was not forbidden, but merely “corrected.” A few sentences stating the heliocentric system as certain (as opposed to a mere hypothesis) were removed, as well as references to the Earth’s being a “star.” Only when Galileo openly challenged the hegemony of the Church did the conflicts start that eventually led to his trial by the Inquisition. Convinced by the strength of his remarkable astronomical findings, Galileo declared the geocentric Ptolemaic model of the Universe as untenable. Moved by a combination of blind ambition and sincere piety, Galileo saw himself as the guiding light of the new Church. He would not only tell the professors of philosophy how stupid they were (he used the word stupid many times when referring to Aristotelians), but also tell the Holy Fathers how to interpret the Scriptures. This affront the Catholic Church could not tolerate. 98 THE AWAKENING [107.23.85.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:22 GMT) The conflict between Galileo and the Church is an excellent, if tragic, metaphor for the clash between the old and the new. The blind arrogance of youth is stymied by the lack of flexibility of the old; the impatient ambition of the young not only stirs the old’s fear of new ideas but poses a threat to its established power. In the short term the old guard wins, but if the strength of the progressive arguments is truly great, it invariably triumphs in the end. Although the Church did manage to silence...