Galileo: A Life by James Reston, Jr. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Modern European Galileo: A Life. By James Reston, Jr. (New York: Harper Collins. 1994. Pp. xiii, 319. S25.00.) Over the past twenty-five years we have come to know much more about the intellectual world in which Galileo moved. We understand better the complexities of the Aristotelian traditions which informed sixteenth) and seventeenth-century European culture and the relationship of Galileo to these traditions. Scholars no longer accept the traditional account of Galileo's overthrow ofAristotelian science. We are now amply informed, thanks to the work of William Wallace, A. Crombie, and others, of Galileo's commitment to an Aristotelian ideal of scientific demonstration. We have also come to recognize the arguments of leading theologians such as Cardinal Bellarmine as being far more than an attempt to protect the authority of the Church. In fact, the controversy between Galileo and the Inquisition is unintelligible were it not the case that both Galileo and the theologians in Rome shared first principles about the nature of science and the relationship between faith and reason. Despite the fact that James Reston relies on a wide range of primary documents , especially letters to and from Galileo, in writing his book, there is little evidence in this biography of the fruit of recent scholarly reflection on Galileo. For the most part, Reston retells the old story of a conflict between religion and science, with emphases on the intrigue of the Jesuits and the paranoia of Pope Urban VIII, concerning which Reston takes special note of the importance of astrological forecasts. The popular legend of Galileo, so important a part of modern culture, is alive and well in the pages of Reston's text. At the end ofthe book Reston writes ofhis meetingwith Cardinal Poupard in April, 1993- The Cardinal was the head of the commission appointed by Pope John Paul II to re-examine the Galileo affair. Reston observes that the Cardinal "repeated again the standard church line 1 had heard often in three years of writing: Galileo had been condemned because he insisted on treating his Copernican theory as truth rather than hypothesis, and he could not prove it. This position deflected attention from a simple fact: The Copernican theory was true, and the church had used extreme and rigorous methods to crush the truth and protect its falsehood" (p. 285). 84 BOOK REVIEWS85 The anachronistic character of Reston's comment is obvious. Nowhere in the book does Reston adequately address the notions of science and scientific demonstration which were current in the early seventeenth century. Recent examinations of the different senses of suppositional reasoning, so important for understanding the positions of Bellarmine and Galileo, are also absent. Thus, Reston sees the controversy between Galileo and his Aristotelian opponents as a "debate between philosophy and science, between the first principles of Aristotle and the evidence of the senses" (p. 69). Theological distinctions also escape the author; yet these are crucial for understanding me Galileo affair. Reston does not seem to be aware of the difference between a literal interpretation ofScripture and one based on what Galileo calls "the nude signification of the words" [il nudo signiflcato délie parole]. On several occasions Reston observes that the view mat the heavens were pure, unchanging, and incorruptible was "a cherished central belief in Christian theology" (p. 1 18). To conceive of the moon as being similar to the earth was "a sacrilege to the church" (p. 93), Reston ignores the fact that Cardinal Bellarmine, when he was a professor at Louvain in the late sixteenth century, had challenged several conclusions of Aristotelian cosmology. Furthermore , if a geocentric cosmology, Aristotelian or otherwise, was a central belief of the Church, how could Bellarmine admit the possibility—as he did in 1615—that the opposite might be demonstrated? Reston writes an engaging narrative, but the reader must be careful to distinguish between the evidence he uses and his additions to that evidence. For example, working with the documents from the Inquisition's questioning of Galileo concerning whether he wrote the Dialogue, Reston quotes from the sources, yet adds comments such as the following: "The inquisitor shoved the book forward on the table toward Galileo with evident...