In God’s Embrace

I

Ever since Galileo Galilei suddenly emerged from obscurity in the early 17th century, he has fascinated scholars and biographers, playwrights, poets and popes. Marjorie Nicolson, in her classic book “Science and Imagination,” put her finger on one of the reasons for that continuing preoccupation: “We may perhaps date the beginning of modern thought from the night of January 7, 1610 when Galileo, by means of the instrument he had developed [the telescope], thought he perceived new planets, and new, expanded worlds.” Galileo’s discovery of the moons orbiting Jupiter, and his many other celestial observations, threatened the current cosmology, drawn as much from the Aristotelians as from the Bible, by which all motions in the heavens were thought to be centered on a fixed Earth, the unique focus of God’s attention and favor. Galileo’s findings, by which he signaled his adherence to the planetary system Copernicus had put forward in 1543, led to a whole catalog of what an initial minority regarded as triumphs of reason and experiment, but what the majority felt to be intolerable assaults on their self-confidence and on the revered ancient teachers’ well-tuned and comfortable worldview. Mankind, with reduced significance, seemed by these new challenges to be decentered and launched into the unfathomable Copernican void, causing John Donne’s famous outburst of 1611, “Its all in peaces, all cohaerence gone.” Through the publication of that scientist and his followers, the list of culture shocks grew exponentially: the elevation of the mathematical aspects of nature over the qualitative ones; the experimental over the intuitive; the objective and skeptical over the subjective and mystical; the divorce of the natural from the supernatural; and with Newton, who acknowledged his debt to Galileo, the mechanization of the universe. As the great scholar Alexandre Koyre remarked: “The mighty, energetic God of Newton who actually ‘ran’ the universe according to His free will and decision, became, in quick succession, a conservative power, an intelligentia supra-mundana, a ‘Dieu faineant’. . . . The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology . . . inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only those--all the others the departed God took away with Him.” The change from the Aristotelian to the Galilean view of how nature works was, as Steven Weinberg explained in his important essay, “The Revolution that Didn’t Happen” (published a year ago in the New York Review of Books), the only major transition in the history of scientific thought that truly deserves the name “paradigm shift.” Standing on the watershed between ancient and modern science, Galileo, in his writings and through his fate, has continued to raise a variety of fundamental questions that persist to this day. Some examples: If God can be known through the scriptures, can He also be apprehended through science? Or are the findings of science and the dogma of religion doomed to be antagonists? How much “evidence” is needed to make a scientific revolution in the first place? What happens when such a major change is proposed, both to the originator and to society itself? What lessons for today may be drawn from the story of the political-ideological battle waged by well-armed enthusiasts against a major scientist or scientific theory? These are among the timely problems skillfully woven into the new biography of Galileo by Dava Sobel, also the author of the fascinating book, “Longitude.” Her “Galileo’s Daughter” is a gripping story, whose main characters are the brilliant but doomed scientist, his adoring and ingenious daughter, Virginia, and the extraordinarily zealous Pope Urban VIII. While the events cover the span of Galileo’s life from 1564 to 1642, some of them seem strangely familiar from the latest news stories emerging from, say, a current inquisitor in Washington or a school board in Kansas.

II

Of the three main characters in the book, the daughter has of course until now been the least known. But thanks to Sobel’s use of her own first translation of Virginia’s 124 surviving letters (addressed mostly to her father), we obtain in effect a Greek chorus view that supplies an abundance of detailed observations, the color and sounds and three-dimensionality of the drama they both had to endure. But beyond that, her letters reveal how a woman’s almost unendurable life was softened by the love for her father--and, above all, for her “bridegroom.” For Virginia--of whom her father wrote that she was “a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me”--was a cloistered nun. With her younger sister Livia, she had been placed in the convent of the Poor Clares in Arcetri, near Florence, at 13, and three years later had taken the veil as Suor Maria Celeste. In other hands, bringing her into the story could have been merely a bow to a now fashionable version of history writing. That could have been expected also because, over the last decades, old ideas about Galileo, as about other figures, have constantly been reevaluated and revised by biographers and scholars. Thus Alexandre Koyre found Galileo to be a neo-Platonist who, far from deserving the position as icon of experimentation in science, may not actually have done any experiments himself. That opinion was disproved by Stillman Drake and Thomas Settle, with documentation of Galileo’s actual laboratory notes. Giorgio de Santillana’s “Crime of Galileo” (1955) used the confrontation with the Inquisition as a preview of how J. Robert Oppenheimer was treated during his security clearance hearings. To Pietro Redondi, Galileo’s heresy was chiefly his suspect belief in atomism. Ludovico Geymonat injected a quasi-Marxist interpretation of the scientist’s motivations, and Mario Biagioli concentrated chiefly on showing Galileo as a well-skilled courtier. So perhaps the time had come to have Virginia revealed as the true author of her father’s works. Not so. Her role in Sobel’s book is quite different: She is her father’s unfailing source of encouragement. She had been born out of wedlock, as had all three of Galileo’s children during his long-lasting relationship with Marina Gamba of Venice. There apparently was no hope for a substantial dowry that might have helped overcome that stigma on both girls. While their placement in a convent was then not an uncommon fate for unmarriageable girls with such a history, few of them would have to experience a more strenuous life and bear it with greater strength than Virginia. For the model whom the nuns tried to emulate was the 13th century originator of their Order, Chiara Offreduccio, who, as Clare, became the first female follower of Francis of Assisi, turning her back on this world, remaining cloistered for life in her convent--a life devoted to poverty, to work and to endless prayer. Dependent on alms, she hovered often near starvation and slept on the bare floor. The Poor Clares of Suor Maria Celeste’s convent were similarly sequestered from the outer world, except for what might pass through the black iron grill barring the nuns’ quarters, or in a basket lowered from the wall. In this way, as Sobel in her eloquent and impeccably neutral style puts it, “they lived hidden in God’s embrace.” Still, Suor Maria Celeste was kept well informed of Galileo’s doings, triumphs and calamities, journeys and illnesses, through her father’s occasional visits to converse through the grill, or through his letters to her (all of which are lost, probably burned at the convent upon his daughter’s death of dysentery at 34). He often would send her money and, at her request, his clothing to be repaired in her few moments between tasks. Through messages or intermediaries she would unfailingly try to help her father, her prayerful pleas mixed with shrewd advice. During one period, while Galileo was waiting in Rome to be interrogated by the Inquisitors and then kept under house arrest in Siena for a time, it was his daughter who essentially ran his complex household not far from the convent, giving the necessary orders and messages--down to advice on how best to preserve the cellared casks of wine, Galileo’s favorite beverage (“light held together by moisture”). It emerges from her letters that Galileo was frequently ill for weeks or months and battled a variety of debilities. Being the convent’s appointed apothecary, his daughter would constantly send him pills and ointments, along with her prayers. Another author may have made more of the comparison between the fate of this talented woman with that of her younger brother Vincenzo. Though evidently far less intelligent and given to mischief, he was sent to university to study law, was declared legitimate by a ducal decree, and at Galileo’s urging was given a sinecure. Sobel lets the disparities in the fates of Galileo’s children speak for themselves.

III

Much of Galileo’s own work and struggles are known to scholars, but the main points are here laid out skillfully and with an eye for the telling detail. One of the big surprises awaiting the reader is how tenuous the evidence was on which Galileo managed to convince himself, and eventually other scientists, of the necessity to accept Copernicus’ model for the solar system, in which the Earth became just one of the many moving planets. To us, so used to the results, it could not have turned out differently. But in fact, not one of his telescopic findings, or his eloquent argument based on them, was crucial for deciding in favor of Copernicus and against Ptolemy--and Galileo’s many enemies made sure that these facts were not kept secret. For example, his discovery that the moon was not perfectly smooth as was thought to be proper for celestial objects, but had mountains and valleys just like the Earth, could be explained away (the uneven areas might be, for example, illusions induced by the glass of the telescope; there had been no confirmation of the finding by actual visit; or, as a last resort, they may merely be an exceptional blemish on an otherwise solid Ptolemaic model). Likewise, the motions of the four visible moons around Jupiter did not disprove the idea that ultimately they too, like all other celestial objects, could make their grand rounds around a central fixed Earth. The discovery that Venus is not constantly luminous but goes through phases just like our moon could be explained by having Venus circle the sun, with the sun still moving around us, as common sense dictated and as several passages in the Bible broadly implied. Even Galileo’s shocking finding that our sun, far from being pure and God-like, has spots moving across its face, was quickly countered by imagining a suitable interposition of hitherto undiscovered planets or clouds, circling the sun and producing the same visual effect. In short, the opponents of Galileo were by no means dumb but rather all too clever, being devoted to a worldview that had worked for centuries and appeared to deserve valiant defense, no holds barred. And they also could confront Galileo with questions he could not answer; for example, if the Earth really was moving in a great orbit about the sun, why did the stars appear to be fixed from one season to the next? In his heart of hearts, Galileo knew well that he lacked a crucial proof, one that could not be denied, until that is, he rode in a barge in Venice and noted that the water carried in a container sloshed back and forth owing to the ship’s motion. Out of that incidental observation grew his theory of the tides: Their ebb and flow, he thought, proved that the oceans’ container, our Earth, was in motion, around the sun as well as around its own axis. It was Galileo’s only major scientific folly, a desperate grasping for safety from his attackers. And it serves as a reminder of the folly of a notion which, for decades in our century, has held philosophers of science in thrall--the famous insistence credited to Karl Popper that the job in science is always to try to find the flaw in one’s ideas, to “falsify” and thereby kill one’s dearest children of thought and experiment. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any scientists in history, or in today’s laboratories, who devote themselves to this procedure. On the contrary, many of the most fruitful advances have come from holding on to a new notion that one believed to be true in one’s very soul, even long before the final, favorable evidence came to hand, and even in the face of apparent contradictory data. During the nascent period of personal struggle with a very difficult problem, what brings the final victory is often the result of devotion to a thematic concept and what Einstein called “the feeling at the tips of one’s fingers.” Errors, like that theory of tides, eventually fall away like useless scaffolding. The belief in Copernicus’ universe, which was the main source of energy initiating the one true scientific revolution, turned out not to be the result of a preference for the far more elegant and beautiful sun-centered universe; nor was it clinched by Galileo’s observations and splendid writings, of which this book has many extracts. Rather, it came from the work of Isaac Newton, born in the year of Galileo’s death. Newton’s “Principia,” among its many fruits, provided the physical-dynamical reasons for the complex motions of the planets, moons, and tides, a physics of grand simplicity that makes sense only in a Copernican system. Dava Sobel’s book also exposes a second obstacle in Galileo’s path--his own, sometimes undiplomatic assertions, made with great certitude at a time when the church was still afflicted by post-Reformation traumatic stress disorder. Of course he thought of himself as a true, believing Catholic. At one point he even made a pilgrimage, and later planned a second one, and for a while was an appointed canon of both Brescia and Pisa, wearing the ecclesiastical tonsure. But he deeply believed in a proposition that had a long history though few friends at the time: that there are two equally valid ways to God--through the scriptures which He had dictated, and through the study of the phenomena of nature which He had created. As a consequence, one did not need to consider the Bible as a manual for teaching science. As Galileo blithely wrote in a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, an important person at the court in Florence, “the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes.” And in this spirit he tried to persuade her of the mobility of the Earth. The grand duchess, a devout believer, had heard such opinion before, and she was not pleased, as she made clear to one of Galileo’s former pupils, Benedetto Castelli. Galileo wrote a lengthy letter to Castelli in an effort to make his theories as convincing as possible and through Castelli make them more appealing to the grand duchess. But that letter turned out to be a catastrophic mistake, the beginning of an inexorable sliding into the abyss. Copies of the letter fell into the wrong hands. A Dominican priest in Florence denounced Galileo from the pulpit, and the inquisitor general in Rome was alerted. Pope Paul V put an end to the matter--for the moment--by having the concept of a Copernican solar system pronounced by edict as “false and contrary to Holy Scripture,” and Copernicus’ book was suspended until “corrections” would be made in it. At least Galileo himself had escaped censure, and he felt relieved. But the trap was further baited by the pope’s theological advisor, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, who had been the inquisitor at the trial of Giordano Bruno. After a fairly pleasant conversation, the cardinal wrote Galileo in 1616 that the Copernican doctrine “cannot be defended or held.” Those five crucial words encouraged Galileo to think he could still write about the Copernican system, especially if he did so in a treatise comparing it with the rival one. What he did not know was that the account of the instruction given to him by Bellarmino and placed into the Vatican secret archives for possible further use, contained also the assertion that he had been advised not to teach the Copernican ideas “in any way” whatever. In 1622, his longtime acquaintance, correspondent and admirer, Maffeo Cardinal Barberini, was elected pontiff, taking the name Urban VIII. Galileo shared his joy with his cloistered daughter and set to work on his long-planned treatise, “The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” which was published in 1632. As was mandatory throughout Catholic Europe for books on any topic, Galileo’s manuscript had been submitted to the Vatican censor, and it was eventually approved for printing. It is one of the marvels of science as well as literature, as the excerpts in Sobel’s book indicate. No matter. Galileo’s persistent and numerous enemies in Rome used this document to provoke the pope’s ire. Urban became persuaded that his instructions and his own person were being mocked in Galileo’s book. Galileo was ordered to appear before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The result, ending in the forced abjuration by Galileo and his public denunciation throughout Italy and abroad, is known to all the world. But Sobel, while keeping her respectful composure, sets forth certain traits of Urban which are curiously resonant with qualities we have seen in some men of power since those days and even in our own very recent history.

IV

On turning from a mere cardinal into a pontiff, Urban quickly revealed a new face. All Christian princes and all princes of the church being subservient to him, he inserted himself--not very successfully--into the complexities of the Thirty Years’ War. (To sleep better despite such preoccupations, he famously ordered all birds in his gardens killed.) Turning more and more into an angry and suspicious man, he found relief in the persecution of infidels who seemed to lurk everywhere. And Galileo, once his friend but now under heavy suspicion, seemed a perfect target. A year after the publication of the “Dialogue,” the pope ordered his cardinal inquisitors to interrogate Galileo to determine, if necessary by torture, if the real purpose behind the writing of the book was to celebrate Copernicus’ theory. Moreover, the “Dialogue” would of course have to be put on the index of prohibited books (where it remained for nearly two centuries), and Galileo should be subjected to a term in prison and be publicly humiliated for his “heinous crimes” as a warning to Christians everywhere. Galileo was declared to be “vehemently suspected of heresy” for having “held and believed” the Copernican theory of the solar system, and “as an example to others” the book was prohibited by public edict. Galileo was condemned to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition. On his knees, he had to read the abjuration written for him. By constant letters from Florence, where the bubonic plague was raging for a second year, Galileo’s daughter tried to console her father, even offering to recite for him the prayers of penance which had been imposed on him for three years. Urban had not done with Galileo. He continued to pursue him with a vengeance, like other men with a holy mission, unaccountable to anyone but God, not hampered by any limits in terms of time, funds or associates who would do their bidding. He could try to hide from the verdict of history behind the subterfuge that the whole trial and sentencing was the work, not of the Church or even his own doing, but of the Inquisition, a committee of cardinals. Sobel carefully teases out the details of Galileo’s continuing persecution. The reprinting of any of Galileo’s earlier publications and the publication of any new ones were outlawed. Galileo was strictly enjoined not to entertain friends and to abstain from any discussion of the Earth’s motion under threat of excommunication. Galileo understood well that his tormentors would find that “it is expedient, in order to put up a show of strict lawfulness, to uphold rigor.” The war waged against him and his reputation was, he wrote, carried on “under the lying mask of religion.” Galileo died a broken man, in 1642. But even then, Urban angrily ordered that there would be no public funeral oration or burial in a mausoleum. Ultimately, the effect on science in Italy, where the scientific revolution had begun and bright minds had flocked to further it, was devastating. John Milton noted that the treatment of Galileo “dampened the glory of Italian wits” and that their writings had been reduced “to flattery and fustian.” Suor Maria Celeste, who died eight years before her father, at least was spared witnessing the degradation of his last years. But in a thrilling ending to her book, Sobel recounts how, a century later, her remains were discovered to have been placed by unknown hands where they properly belonged--with those of her father. And at the end of the last century, Pope Leo XIII agreed with Galileo’s position in the fateful letter to the grand duchess, that the Bible was not a source for teaching science--as did Pope Pius XII in 1950. In recent years, Pope John Paul II has taken new interest in Galileo’s views and his condemnation, concluding that the historic encounter had been “a tragic mutual incomprehension” rather than “a fundamental opposition between science and faith.” Indeed, during his visit to his native Poland last June, John Paul II made a point of lauding Copernicus in a speech at the Copernicus University, in the astronomer’s birth town of Torun. It is only the latest twist, and surely not the last, in the tale of Galileo, and, thanks to Sobel’s new book, also that of his daughter.