Chapter 6
"We find in Galileo not only literary distinction, but also the love of piety, and he is also strong in those qualities by which the pontifical good-will is easily obtained. And now, when he has been brought to this city to congratulate us on our elevation, we have very lovingly embraced him; nor can we suffer him to return to the country whither your liberality calls him, without an ample provision of pontifical love. And that you may know how dear he is to us, we have willed to give him this honourable testimonial of virtue and piety. And we further signify that every benefit which you shall confer upon him, imitating or even surpassing your father's liberality, will conduce to our gratification."
The favourable reception which had been accorded to him by Pope Urban VIII. seems to have led Galileo to expect that there might be some corresponding change in the attitude of the Papal authorities on the great question of the stability of the earth. He accordingly proceeded with the preparation of the chief work of his life, "The Dialogue of the two Systems." It was submitted for inspection by the constituted authorities. The Pope himself thought that, if a few conditions which he laid down were duly complied with, there could be no objection to the publication of the work. In the first place, the title of the book was to be so carefully worded as to show plainly that the Copernican doctrine was merely to be regarded as an hypothesis, and not as a scientific fact. Galileo was also instructed to conclude the book with special arguments which had been supplied by the Pope himself, and which appeared to his Holiness to be quite conclusive against the new doctrine of Copernicus.
Formal leave for the publication of the Dialogue was then given to Galileo by the Inquisitor General, and it was accordingly sent to the press. It might be thought that the anxieties of the astronomer about his book would then have terminated. As a matter of fact, they had not yet seriously begun. Riccardi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, having suddenly had some further misgivings, sent to Galileo for the manuscript while the work was at the printer's, in order that the doctrine it implied might be once again examined. Apparently, Riccardi had come to the conclusion that he had not given the matter sufficient attention, when the authority to go to press had been first and, perhaps, hastily given. Considerable delay in the issue of the book was the result of these further deliberations. At last, however, in June, 1632, Galileo's great work, "The Dialogue of the two Systems," was produced for the instruction of the world, though the occasion was fraught with ruin to the immortal author.
[PLATE: FACSIMILE SKETCH OF LUNAR SURFACE BY GALILEO.]
The book, on its publication, was received and read with the greatest avidity. But presently the Master of The Sacred Palace found reason to regret that he had given his consent to its appearance. He accordingly issued a peremptory order to sequestrate every copy in Italy. This sudden change in the Papal attitude towards Galileo formed the subject of a strong remonstrance addressed to the Roman authorities by the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Pope himself seemed to have become impressed all at once with the belief that the work contained matter of an heretical description. The general interpretation put upon the book seems to have shown the authorities that they had mistaken its true tendency, notwithstanding the fact that it had been examined again and again by theologians deputed for the duty. To the communication from the Grand Duke the Pope returned answer, that he had decided to submit the book to a congregation of "learned, grave, and saintly men," who would weigh every word in it. The views of his Holiness personally on the subject were expressed in his belief that the Dialogue contained the most perverse matter that could come into a reader's hands.
The Master of the Sacred Palace was greatly blamed by the authorities for having given his sanction to its issue. He pleaded that the book had not been printed in the precise terms of the original manuscript which had been submitted to him. It was also alleged that Galileo had not adhered to his promise of inserting properly the arguments which the Pope himself had given in support of the old and orthodox view. One of these had, no doubt, been introduced, but, so far from mending Galileo's case, it had made matters really look worse for the poor philosopher. The Pope's argument had been put into the mouth of one of the characters in the Dialogue named "Simplicio." Galileo's enemies maintained that by adopting such a method for the expression of his Holiness's opinion, Galileo had intended to hold the Pope himself up to ridicule. Galileo's friends maintained that nothing could have been farther from his intention. It seems, however, highly probable that the suspicions thus aroused had something to say to the sudden change of front on the part of the Papal authorities.
On 1st October, 1632, Galileo received an order to appear before the Inquisition at Rome on the grave charge of heresy. Galileo, of course, expressed his submission, but pleaded for a respite from compliance with the summons, on the ground of his advanced age and his failing health. The Pope was, however, inexorable; he said that he had warned Galileo of his danger while he was still his friend. The command could not be disobeyed. Galileo might perform the journey as slowly as he pleased, but it was imperatively necessary for him to set forth and at once.
On 20th January, 1633, Galileo started on his weary journey to Rome, in compliance with this peremptory summons. On 13th February he was received as the guest of Niccolini, the Tuscan ambassador, who had acted as his wise and ever-kind friend throughout the whole affair. It seemed plain that the Holy Office were inclined to treat Galileo with as much clemency and consideration as was consistent with the determination that the case against him should be proceeded with to the end. The Pope intimated that in consequence of his respect for the Grand Duke of Tuscany he should permit Galileo to enjoy the privilege, quite unprecedented for a prisoner charged with heresy, of remaining as an inmate in the ambassador's house. He ought, strictly, to have been placed in the dungeons of the Inquisition. When the examination of the accused had actually commenced, Galileo was confined, not, indeed, in the dungeons, but in comfortable rooms at the Holy Office.
By the judicious and conciliatory language of submission which Niccolini had urged Galileo to use before the Inquisitors, they were so far satisfied that they interceded with the Pope for his release. During the remainder of the trial Galileo was accordingly permitted to go back to the ambassador's, where he was most heartily welcomed. Sister Maria Celeste, evidently thinking this meant that the whole case was at an end, thus expresses herself:--
"The joy that your last dear letter brought me, and the having to read it over and over to the nuns, who made quite a jubilee on hearing its contents, put me into such an excited state that at last I got a severe attack of headache."
In his defence Galileo urged that he had already been acquitted in 1616 by Cardinal Bellarmine, when a charge of heresy was brought against him, and he contended that anything he might now have done, was no more than he had done on the preceding occasion, when the orthodoxy of his doctrines received solemn confirmation. The Inquisition seemed certainly inclined to clemency, but the Pope was not satisfied. Galileo was accordingly summoned again on the 21st June. He was to be threatened with torture if he did not forthwith give satisfactory explanations as to the reasons which led him to write the Dialogue. In this proceeding the Pope assured the Tuscan ambassador that he was treating Galileo with the utmost consideration possible in consequence of his esteem and regard for the Grand Duke, whose servant Galileo was. It was, however, necessary that some exemplary punishment be meted out to the astronomer, inasmuch as by the publication of the Dialogue he had distinctly disobeyed the injunction of silence laid upon him by the decree of 1616. Nor was it admissible for Galileo to plead that his book had been sanctioned by the Master of the Sacred College, to whose inspection it had been again and again submitted. It was held, that if the Master of the Sacred College had been unaware of the solemn warning the philosopher had already received sixteen years previously, it was the duty of Galileo to have drawn his attention to that fact.
On the 22nd June, 1633, Galileo was led to the great hall of the Inquisition, and compelled to kneel before the cardinals there assembled and hear his sentence. In a long document, most elaborately drawn up, it is definitely charged against Galileo that, in publishing the Dialogue, he committed the essentially grave error of treating the doctrine of the earth's motion as open to discussion. Galileo knew, so the document affirmed, that the Church had emphatically pronounced this notion to be contrary to Holy Writ, and that for him to consider a doctrine so stigmatized as having any shadow of probability in its favour was an act of disrespect to the authority of the Church which could not be overlooked. It was also charged against Galileo that in his Dialogue he has put the strongest arguments into the mouth, not of those who supported the orthodox doctrine, but of those who held the theory as to the earth's motion which the Church had so deliberately condemned.
After due consideration of the defence made by the prisoner, it was thereupon decreed that he had rendered himself vehemently suspected of heresy by the Holy Office, and in consequence had incurred all the censures and penalties of the sacred canons, and other decrees promulgated against such persons. The graver portion of these punishments would be remitted, if Galileo would solemnly repudiate the heresies referred to by an abjuration to be pronounced by him in the terms laid down.
At the same time it was necessary to mark, in some emphatic manner, the serious offence which had been committed, so that it might serve both as a punishment to Galileo and as a warning to others. It was accordingly decreed that he should be condemned to imprisonment in the Holy Office during the pleasure of the Papal authorities, and that he should recite once a week for three years the seven Penitential Psalms.
Then followed that ever-memorable scene in the great hall of the Inquisition, in which the aged and infirm Galileo, the inventor of the telescope and the famous astronomer, knelt down to abjure before the most eminent and reverend Lords Cardinal, Inquisitors General throughout the Christian Republic against heretical depravity. With his hands on the Gospels, Galileo was made to curse and detest the false opinion that the sun was the centre of the universe and immovable, and that the earth was not the centre of the same, and that it moved. He swore that for the future he will never say nor write such things as may bring him under suspicion, and that if he does so he submits to all the pains and penalties of the sacred canons. This abjuration was subsequently read in Florence before Galileo's disciples, who had been specially summoned to attend.
It has been noted that neither on the first occasion, in 1616, nor on the second in 1633, did the reigning Pope sign the decrees concerning Galileo. The contention has accordingly been made that Paul V. and Urban VIII. are both alike vindicated from any technical responsibility for the attitude of the Romish Church towards the Copernican doctrines. The significance of this circumstance has been commented on in connection with the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope.
We can judge of the anxiety felt by Sister Maria Celeste about her beloved father during these terrible trials. The wife of the ambassador Niccolini, Galileo's steadfast friend, most kindly wrote to give the nun whatever quieting assurances the case would permit. There is a renewed flow of these touching epistles from the daughter to her father. Thus she sends word--
"The news of your fresh trouble has pierced my soul with grief all the more that it came quite unexpectedly."
And again, on hearing that he had been permitted to leave Rome, she writes--
"I wish I could describe the rejoicing of all the mothers and sisters on hearing of your happy arrival at Siena. It was indeed most extraordinary. On hearing the news the Mother Abbess and many of the nuns ran to me, embracing me and weeping for joy and tenderness."
The sentence of imprisonment was at first interpreted leniently by the Pope. Galileo was allowed to reside in qualified durance in the archbishop's house at Siena. Evidently the greatest pain that he endured arose from the forced separation from that daughter, whom he had at last learned to love with an affection almost comparable with that she bore to him. She had often told him that she never had any pleasure equal to that with which she rendered any service to her father. To her joy, she discovers that she can relieve him from the task of reciting the seven Penitential Psalms which had been imposed as a Penance:--
"I began to do this a while ago," she writes, "and it gives me much pleasure. First, because I am persuaded that prayer in obedience to Holy Church must be efficacious; secondly, in order to save you the trouble of remembering it. If I had been able to do more, most willingly would I have entered a straiter prison than the one I live in now, if by so doing I could have set you at liberty."
[PLATE: CREST OF GALILEO'S FAMILY.]
Sister Maria Celeste was gradually failing in health, but the great privilege was accorded to her of being able once again to embrace her beloved lord and master. Galileo had, in fact, been permitted to return to his old home; but on the very day when he heard of his daughter's death came the final decree directing him to remain in his own house in perpetual solitude.
Amid the advancing infirmities of age, the isolation from friends, and the loss of his daughter, Galileo once again sought consolation in hard work. He commenced his famous dialogue on Motion. Gradually, however, his sight began to fail, and blindness was at last added to his other troubles. On January 2nd, 1638, he writes to Diodati:--
"Alas, your dear friend and servant, Galileo, has been for the last month perfectly blind, so that this heaven, this earth, this universe which I by my marvellous discoveries and clear demonstrations have enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward is for me shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations."
But the end was approaching--the great philosopher, was attacked by low fever, from which he died on the 8th January, 1643.
KEPLER.
While the illustrious astronomer, Tycho Brahe, lay on his death-bed, he had an interview which must ever rank as one of the important incidents in the history of science. The life of Tycho had been passed, as we have seen, in the accumulation of vast stores of careful observations of the positions of the heavenly bodies. It was not given to him to deduce from his splendid work the results to which they were destined to lead. It was reserved for another astronomer to distil, so to speak, from the volumes in which Tycho's figures were recorded, the great truths of the universe which those figures contained. Tycho felt that his work required an interpreter, and he recognised in the genius of a young man with whom he was acquainted the agent by whom the world was to be taught some of the great truths of nature. To the bedside of the great Danish astronomer the youthful philosopher was summoned, and with his last breath Tycho besought of him to spare no labour in the performance of those calculations, by which alone the secrets of the movements of the heavens could be revealed. The solemn trust thus imposed was duly accepted, and the man who accepted it bore the immortal name of Kepler.
Kepler was born on the 27th December, 1571, at Weil, in the Duchy of Wurtemberg. It would seem that the circumstances of his childhood must have been singularly unhappy. His father, sprung from a well-connected family, was but a shiftless and idle adventurer; nor was the great astronomer much more fortunate in his other parent. His mother was an ignorant and ill-tempered woman; indeed, the ill-assorted union came to an abrupt end through the desertion of the wife by her husband when their eldest son John, the hero of our present sketch, was eighteen years old. The childhood of this lad, destined for such fame, was still further embittered by the circumstance that when he was four years old he had a severe attack of small-pox. Not only was his eyesight permanently injured, but even his constitution appears to have been much weakened by this terrible malady.
It seems, however, that the bodily infirmities of young John Kepler were the immediate cause of his attention being directed to the pursuit of knowledge. Had the boy been fitted like other boys for ordinary manual work, there can be hardly any doubt that to manual work his life must have been devoted. But, though his body was feeble, he soon gave indications of the possession of considerable mental power. It was accordingly thought that a suitable sphere for his talents might be found in the Church which, in those days, was almost the only profession that afforded an opening for an intellectual career. We thus find that by the time John Kepler was seventeen years old he had attained a sufficient standard of knowledge to entitle him to admission on the foundation of the University at Tubingen.
In the course of his studies at this institution he seems to have divided his attention equally between astronomy and divinity. It not unfrequently happens that when a man has attained considerable proficiency in two branches of knowledge he is not able to see very clearly in which of the two pursuits his true vocation lies. His friends and onlookers are often able to judge more wisely than he himself can do as to which of the two lines it would be better for him to pursue. This incapacity for perceiving the path in which greatness awaited him, existed in the case of Kepler. Personally, he inclined to enter the ministry, in which a promising career seemed open to him. He yielded, however, to friends, who evidently knew him better than he knew himself, and accepted in 1594, the important Professorship of astronomy which had been offered to him in the University of Gratz.
It is difficult for us in these modern days to realise the somewhat extraordinary duties which were expected from an astronomical professor in the sixteenth century. He was, of course, required to employ his knowledge of the heavens in the prediction of eclipses, and of the movements of the heavenly bodies generally. This seems reasonable enough; but what we are not prepared to accept is the obligation which lay on the astronomers to predict the fates of nations and the destinies of individuals.
It must be remembered that it was the almost universal belief in those days, that all the celestial spheres revolved in some mysterious fashion around the earth, which appeared by far the most important body in the universe. It was imagined that the sun, the moon, and the stars indicated, in the vicissitudes of their movements, the careers of nations and of individuals. Such being the generally accepted notion, it seemed to follow that a professor who was charged with the duty of expounding the movements of the heavenly bodies must necessarily be looked to for the purpose of deciphering the celestial decrees regarding the fate of man which the heavenly luminaries were designed to announce.
Kepler threw himself with characteristic ardour into even this fantastic phase of the labours of the astronomical professor; he diligently studied the rules of astrology, which the fancies of antiquity had compiled. Believing sincerely as he did in the connection between the aspect of the stars and the state of human affairs, he even thought that he perceived, in the events of his own life, a corroboration of the doctrine which affirmed the influence of the planets upon the fate of individuals.
[PLATE: KEPLER'S SYSTEM OF REGULAR SOLIDS.]
But quite independently of astrology there seem to have been many other delusions current among the philosophers of Kepler's time. It is now almost incomprehensible how the ablest men of a few centuries ago should have entertained such preposterous notions, as they did, with respect to the system of the universe. As an instance of what is here referred to, we may cite the extraordinary notion which, under the designation of a discovery, first brought Kepler into fame. Geometers had long known that there were five, but no more than five, regular solid figures. There is, for instance, the cube with six sides, which is, of course, the most familiar of these solids. Besides the cube there are other figures of four, eight, twelve, and twenty sides respectively. It also happened that there were five planets, but no more than five, known to the ancients, namely, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. To Kepler's lively imaginations this coincidence suggested the idea that the five regular solids corresponded to the five planets, and a number of fancied numerical relations were adduced on the subject. The absurdity of this doctrine is obvious enough, especially when we observe that, as is now well known, there are two large planets, and a host of small planets, over and above the magical number of the regular solids. In Kepler's time, however, this doctrine was so far from being regarded as absurd, that its announcement was hailed as a great intellectual triumph. Kepler was at once regarded with favour. It seems, indeed, to have been the circumstance which brought him into correspondence with Tycho Brahe. By its means also he became known to Galileo.
The career of a scientific professor in those early days appears generally to have been marked by rather more striking vicissitudes than usually befall a professor in a modern university. Kepler was a Protestant, and as such he had been appointed to his professorship at Gratz. A change, however, having taken place in the religious belief entertained by the ruling powers of the University, the Protestant professors were expelled. It seems that special influence having been exerted in Kepler's case on account of his exceptional eminence, he was recalled to Gratz and reinstated in the tenure of his chair. But his pupils had vanished, so that the great astronomer was glad to accept a post offered him by Tycho Brahe in the observatory which the latter had recently established near Prague.
On Tycho's death, which occurred soon after, an opening presented itself which gave Kepler the opportunity his genius demanded. He was appointed to succeed Tycho in the position of imperial mathematician. But a far more important point, both for Kepler and for science, was that to him was confided the use of Tycho's observations. It was, indeed, by the discussion of Tycho's results that Kepler was enabled to make the discoveries which form such an important part of astronomical history.