Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context

Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context.  By Fr. Paschal Scotti, Ignatius Press, 2017.

 

The story of Galileo and how the Catholic Church treated him in the wake of his proclamations of a heliocentric universe has been told often, but has rarely been told accurately.  In most of the incarnations of the story, the Church is hidebound, brutal, dogmatic, anti-science, and Galileo is a heroic paragon of truth and freedom of intellectual inquiry.  It’s a simplistic morality play with science versus religion at the center, and all of the points go towards science.  This narrative has become a part of the shared international discourse, and like many stories that “everybody knows,” it’s a combination of truths, half-truths, outright lies, distortions, misinterpretations, overlooked facts, and biased opinions. 

 

(For an overview of the historiographical position critical of Galileo, check out Michael F. Flynn’s article “The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down-and-Dirty Mud-Wrassle” http://www2.fiu.edu/~blissl/Flynngs.pdf.  A much longer version can be found here: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html.)

 

Fr. Paschal Scotti’s new book Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context provides a fresh look at the oft-told story, one where the Catholic Church comes across as a much more sympathetic force, and one which calls a lot of the traditional elements of the narrative into question.  

 

Early in the book, Scotti writes:

 

“Galileo is one of those iconic figures in history for whom there is endless fascination.  Besides an abundant scholarly literarture, the “Galileo industry,”as one author put it, there also has been great general interest in him, as we see in a stream of biographies…”

 

All of us have grown up with the idea of the warfare between science and religion.  While the idea began with the Enlightenment, it reached its high-water mark in the Victorian period.  Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). The “Pope of Science,” pushed the military metaphor in his attempt to professionalize science, moving it from a part of Christian apologetics, the preserve of Anglican gentlemen and clerics, or rather, gentlemen clerics, into a hard-edged secular discipline financed by the state, and ordered to public usefulness.  Only by discrediting the religious culture of the traditional, Anglican-landed Establishment could his science come into its own.  Who can forget his pugnacious line, “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.”  This polarization, or at least the attempt to create polarization, was part of the means by which he achieved it; and it was as much about class, power, and prestige as about the pursuit of truth.  This was equally true of the United States, which, while not having an official Protestant Establishment, was a society profoundly influenced by the Protestant churches and where the clergy were among its cultural and political leaders.”

 

One of the major points of this book is that most narratives about Galileo are sadly deficient in providing salient details about the case, the time period, and anything else that might provide nuance, complexity, and contradiction to an otherwise oversimplified story.

 

“Recent scholarship has been much more positive about the Church’s role in science.  The respected historian of science Edward Grant rather sees Christianity as supportive of science and the Christian Middle Ages as laying the foundations for the Scientific Revolution.  Despite the clear religious orientation of the Middle Ages, science was given enormous institutional support in that uniquely medieval creation, the universities, where the arts curriculum was basically a scientific one and whose main job was the training of clerics.  This respect for science was equally true of astronomy as of any other science.  As J.L. Heilbron put it in his study of churches as solar observatories: “The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.”

 

It should be noted that Scotti’s work is on a historiographical spectrum, which ranges from directing the brunt of the criticism towards the Church or towards Galileo.  In his conclusion, Scotti spreads the blame around widely, saying that, “there is more than plenty of blame to go around, and Galileo was far from the only culprit.”   He argues that Galileo’s personality hurt his cause, as did the Church’s approach to dissent in the wake of the rise of Protestantism, and that Galileo’s envious rivals in the scientific community encouraged his downfall.  In the end, Scotti defends Galileo’s work and even suggests the possibility of reconciliation through canonization, though this is far from a universal opinion.

 

There are a bunch of interesting points that Scotti does not address in as much depth as he could have in this book, such as the problems connected to Galileo’s flaws and false assumptions in his theories, such as the issue of perfectly circular planetary orbits as opposed to elliptical ones.

 

For all the references to Dava Sobel’s influential book Galileo’s Daughter, which reignited interest in Galileo’s life, no mention is made of another book by Sobel of particular contextual importance: Longitude, the story of John Harrison, who almost single-handedly solved the problem of calculating longitude while at sea, solving a critical problem affecting navigation of the oceans.  In the eighteenth century, the British scientific community (largely secular and/or Anglican) near-universally believed that the best (indeed, the only) way to make such a calculation would be to devise a complex mathematical equation that could discern longitude through calculating the positions of the stars.  It was to be a beautiful, elegant solution for gentleman astronomers.

 

It was, in reality, a deeply flawed and inefficient plan.  One could only perform the calculations at night.  What happened if it were cloudy?  Or if something happened to those who understood the calculation system?  Indeed, since no reliable formula was ever devised, the idea might be impossible.  But the scientific establishment was determined to crush Harrison, who devised a mechanical device the size of a pocket watch, which successfully calculated longitude instantly, any time of day, and easily determinable by anyone.  Harrison solved the problem, but the leaders of the scientific community refused to acknowledge it, partly because it rendered their own lifetimes of work largely futile.

 

The point of this anecdote is that perhaps the conflict between science and religion is not as applicable to the Galileo case and similar cases as the conflict between one scientific theory and another scientific theory.  The general belief in a geocentric universe was not based solely on religion but on the science of the time (and to an extent, going back through antiquity).  Similarly, the scientist who first discovered that ulcers were mainly caused by bacteria and not stress was widely castigated before he was vindicated and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

 

Scotti’s book does a fine job of explaining how the history of the Galileo case is much more complex– and interesting– than it is usually credited as being, yet the broader context of similar cases, as well as the other influences of political considerations and the problems of scientific verification and the then-slow dissemination of information, need further analysis.

 

–Chris Chan