"We are in 1642. January 6, to be exact. And that's when the miracle occurs: the great scientist Galileo Galilei, also known as Galileo in France, has just died for the second time, in his villa in Arcetri, in Florence. Why die for the second time? Because he had already died in 1633, burned by the Inquisition for daring to affirm that the Earth is round."

On this little humorous note, let's tackle one of the greatest mythical figures of what I could call "scientistic myths"¹. Yes, there are historical myths, often the fruit of rather superstitious and partisan minds and clichés: it's extremely difficult to see the opposing position objectively, especially when it shocks and marks our beliefs. Should we blame Man, those who promulgate them? No. Man tends, often, even a bit too much, to create idols. And not believing in a religion, however laudable the goal behind it may be, is not a sufficient reason not to have irrational tendencies (I would even say, playing devil's advocate, that believing in a religion helps limit irrational beliefs to one domain rather than spreading them to other subjects). Likewise, being religious is not a sufficient reason to be irrational. At least, I hope so, if you're reading this post and you start from the principle that the content is irrational because its author is religious... save time, put this quibble aside and go directly to the sources at the bottom, form your own opinion.

As you've probably guessed from the article's incipit, we're going to debunk today a myth of the greatest "martyr" of SCIENCE!™² I name Galileo. Or Galileo Galilei, if like me your reading on the subject is essentially non-French. Damn, these pesky Frenchies and their will to Frenchize everything!

To start things off properly, let's talk a little about Galileo. Galileo was an Italian mathematician, geometer, physicist and astronomer, known for his observations in astronomy. Born in Pisa in 1564, he died in Arcetri on January 8, 1642 at the age of 77. He is known mainly for having perfected and exploited the astronomical telescope, posing as a defender of the Copernican modeling approach to the Universe, proposing to adopt heliocentrism and satellite movements.

As a scientistic martyr, Galileo is the source of many myths. The best known come from the Galileo Affair, which we will deal with here.

Here is the legendary story in a word: Galileo was a scientist very ahead of his century, having successfully reproduced the intelligence of the Ancients and the observation of the Universe, and dared to defend the roundness of the Earth at the hands of a terrifying and obscurantist Catholic Church ©, which immediately had him arrested, pushed to rejection, accused of blasphemy and burned in the public square as punishment for daring to defy Divine Law! Or else, because he proved that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around.

Something like that.

In any case, it proves that the church is against science.

Where to begin? First, it must be understood that the affair is not as simple as the Science vs. Religion myth wants us to believe and that it's not a simple idea of obscurantist Middle Ages against scientific Renaissance; but that the positions of Galileo and the various ecclesiastical dignitaries in question were very varied and complex.

Already, let's be clear: I will not deal here with the obscuranticostupidisticoscientistic myth that affirms that PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE AGES THOUGHT THE EARTH WAS FLAT, WHICH IS FALSE. I will deal with this in ANOTHER subject, devoted to the Middle Ages. Because there's a lot to say on the subject...

Let's take the first myth: Galileo proved that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around.

This is not true. Copernicus, sorry, Nikolaus Kopernikus, a Polish Catholic canon, had already proposed a heliocentric model 32 years before Galileo was born, in 1539. The Copernican model was one of many models under discussion at the time, and the debate was not one-sided: some leaned toward a heliocentric vision, others toward a geocentric vision³. What Galileo actually did was add his observations of the phases of Venus to the debate, specifying that these observations agreed better with heliocentrism. But he never "proved" heliocentrism. And for good reason: at the time there were various objections to heliocentrism that were difficult to definitively refute, and all astronomers (including Galileo) knew it; notably the absence of an observable parallax, and the problematic influence of an inertia caused by the Earth's rotation, to cite only the two main ones. In fact, these reasons were known to the Greeks, and were the reasons why they had rejected heliocentrism⁴.

And when Galileo strongly (*cough*) argued for the Copernican model, he didn't "prove" heliocentrism correctly. He also got some points wrong, notably the shape of planetary orbits (he rejected Kepler's idea of elliptical orbits in favor of a circular view), and the fact that tides came from the Earth's rotation.

Here for the first myth, which I allow myself to correct as follows: Galileo did not prove heliocentrism.

Second myth, a bit more violent: The church rejected science, condemned heliocentrism, and was ignorant of the science behind Copernicus's theory.

Comically ironic, you couldn't be further from the truth: Galileo's greatest defenders were ecclesiastics, while many of his detractors were scientists (Please, don't correct your vision of the Galileo affair by adding bias and thinking it's PRECISELY because they were churchmen, they poorly defended history...). In fact, the Catholic Church rejects the idea that rational analysis of the world is bad since... at least the second council, in 381⁵, which allowed the development of Greek reflection of Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes and other great thinkers of Antiquity during the medieval period under the name of "natural philosophy", ancestor of what we call "science".

The church was very open to Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself was aware of the limits of his model as well as the problems it faced, which was the reason for many of his hesitations before publishing the manuscript. It was only under the encouragement of the Bishop of Warmia, Tiedemann Giese, that his ideas began to circulate from 1530. Copernicus's thesis had immediate success, and from 1533, Pope Clement VII asked Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter, a German humanist, to give him instruction on it in the Vatican Gardens.

Galileo himself was well regarded for his education within the Jesuit Order⁶, to the point that some considered him almost one of their own. They had even reproduced telescopes at the Gregorian University, and repeated his results to face the first objections.

We then arrive in 1616. And there, the story gets a bit complicated: indeed, no less than SEVEN cosmological models were being debated in scientific circles:

1. Heraclidean: geo-heliocentric model, where Mercury and Venus orbit around the Sun, everything else orbits around the Earth;
2. Ptolemaic: geocentric model, with a stationary Earth;
3. Copernican: heliocentric model, with circular orbits;
4. Gilbertian: geocentric model, with a rotating Earth;
5. Tychonic: geo-heliocentric model. The Sun and Moon orbit around the Earth, everything else orbits around the sun;
6. Ursinian: like the Tychonic model, but with a rotating Earth;
7. Keplerian: heliocentric model, with elliptical orbits.

As many ecclesiastics were also great scholars, many of them took part in the debate. At that time, heliocentrism was an alternative idea to geocentrism quite valid, worthy of consideration and study, and was not (yet) condemned, suppressed or struck with heresy. The Tychonic model was actually favored as the successor to Ptolemy's. It's Kepler's that will win, but it's the one everyone rejected... including Galileo.

Let's correct the second myth: The church did not reject science, knew Copernicus's theory, and did not (yet) condemn heliocentrism.

Let's drive the nail in further with the third myth: the church condemned heliocentrism because it thought the Bible should be interpreted literally.

Hello to anticlericals of all stripes and literal fundamentalists: this is not the church's view. The church has not taught that the Bible should be interpreted literally (and still doesn't). This idea is actually a very modern idea, dating in reality from the 19th century, originating from fundamentalist Protestant thought in the United States. In reality, the Catholic Church, both then and today, indicated that any passage of the Bible could be interpreted by at least... four levels of reading⁷: the literal sense, the allegorical or symbolic sense, the moral sense and the eschatological sense. Of all, the literal sense is seen as being the least important, and the most vulgar. This meant that a verse of scripture could be interpreted through one or more levels, and that it might have no literal meaning and be only metaphorical. This is an important distinction, because the Church had no problem learning that it could no longer read a passage literally following a better understanding of the world.

The problem is that to show the Church that a passage was not literal, one had to, at minimum, show that it wasn't the case. A conclusive demonstration suffices... something Galileo failed to do.

Indeed, as Cardinal Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino noted... sorry, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine in 1616 following his study of Galileo's texts:

"If there were a true demonstration that the Sun is at the center of the world and that the earth is in the third heaven, and that the sun does not revolve around the earth but that the earth revolves around the sun, then we would have to be extremely careful in explaining the Scriptures that seem to indicate the contrary, and we should rather say that we do not understand them than say that what we have demonstrated is false. But this is not a thing to be done hastily, and for my part I do not think such proof exists until it is shown to me."

Bellarmine was not ignorant, teaching natural philosophy at the University of Flanders, and therefore knew the state of the cosmological debate at the time. And he knew, like Galileo, that geocentrism was the preferred theory at the time, and that heliocentrism was far from proven. Once the debate was clarified, the Church reconsidered and reinterpreted the scriptures following Bellarmine's indications.

To refute the rumor that indicated Galileo had been punished, Bellarmine went so far as to provide him, dated May 26, 1616, a document certifying that this was not the case; but that he could not teach heliocentrism as truth for lack of proof.

I'll let you correct the third myth yourself!

Let's continue in our enumeration: "Galileo was imprisoned, chained, beaten, tortured, threatened then eventually burned at the stake", which constitutes a fourth myth.

Reference is often made to the Inquisition with a certain morbid passion, insisting that Galileo had been tortured, like others, to madness for daring to speculate on the nature of things. Our (somewhat) French Voltaire states well how Galileo ended his life in the dungeons of the Inquisition, retracting in the face of the (understandable) fear of being burned.

Back to reality: Galileo spent the entirety of his 1633 trial as a guest of honor in luxurious residences in Rome. He was not tortured nor in danger of being so, partly because of his great age, partly because of the zeal and enthusiasm with which he cooperated (yes, yes, he cooperated) with the investigation. In case of problems, his numerous friendships with important members of the clergy would certainly have been enough to get him out of trouble. He was never threatened with the stake (a punishment reserved only for heretics, after persistence and relapse). Nor did he live in a dungeon, unless one considers his house in Florence, where he was placed under house arrest and composed his last great works, as such.

It's true that putting a man, during the trial, under house arrest and condemning him for his ideas hurts our modern sensibilities. However, remove this violent idea of torture, imprisonment and execution by burning from this nasty myth.

Next myth: Galileo was condemned simply for using SCIENCE!™ to question the church's dogmas, which was forbidden by the Church.

As mentioned numerous times, the Church did not condemn scientific research. Already, because no one was a "scientist" (the term dates from 1833 under the pen of William Whewell); but also because the vast majority of "natural philosophers" were churchmen. And it wasn't a problem for anyone to show that it was necessary to reinterpret the scriptures following a new understanding of the world. As mentioned by the Church (taken up by the encyclical Fides et Ratio), divine revelation and rational revelation cannot contradict each other, because they both come from the same source; thus, if there's conflict, it's that our understanding poses a problem.

Let's go back to our good Cardinal Bellarmine's note: "this is not a thing to be done hastily". I don't think a good scientist today thinks of forcing the passage of their theory without experiment or confirmation (in any case, in my case, it's not what I do). One of the problems of the Galileo affair comes from there: Galileo and the minority of scientists who defended heliocentrism had not yet managed to completely prove the objections that were being made against them⁸. Imagine yourself publishing a paper against an academic majority composed of an army of Aristotelians: not one would have let your nonsense pass the peer-review.

There was also another problem, more political: the Protestant Reformation had taken place. As a result, the church looked very unfavorably on any attempt at biblical reinterpretation by a non-theologian. And no one had really considered heliocentrism to be a problem... until Galileo wrote in his letters to Castelli, proposing his own reinterpretation of the Bible to make it conform with the Copernican model. And it's there, truly, where the Galileo affair begins. Yet, at first, the Inquisition authorities didn't react, and rejected the charges twice.

Following Bellarmine's note in 1616, Galileo, unable to prove his theory, had to concede that he didn't have the proof; and had to agree to present the Copernican model only as a calculatory model, unable to show its veracity: his attempts to produce a justification of the Earth's rotation through tides did not please his contemporaries (although we know today it's false), and was judged foolish at the time.

But Galileo was convinced of the veracity of the Copernican model. A bit annoyed, he went to find one of his friends, who had become pope under the name Urban VIII. Following a debate, the pope gave him several arguments (false, today) that refuted heliocentrism. To calm things down, Pope Urban VIII proposed to Galileo in 1632 to write a book presenting both the Copernican model (heliocentric), and the Ptolemaic model (geocentric), with their respective weaknesses and strengths, properly and objectively. This is where Galileo wrote his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (or rather, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems). The problem is that the objective vision takes a hit, and Galileo allows himself a certain provocative attitude: the book is written by proposing the Copernican model as superior, under the guise of Salviati, the Copernican, while most of the pope's arguments are slipped into the mouth of a character called Simplicio... which means "the idiot" in Italian.

One can imagine the pope's reaction: for him, it's mockery and an attack on the 1616 injunction. He withdrew his support for Galileo and authorized his examination by the Inquisition, adding that he had flouted the agreement reached for the writing of the Dialogues. Strongly shaken, Galileo tried to show, during the tribunal, that he had neither wanted to affirm that the Sun is fixed, but that in reality, he had shown that the Copernican hypothesis was in error. The Inquisitors, who weren't the type to laugh easily, knowing that Galileo was playing them, condemned him for "strong suspicion of heresy", an unjust motion knowing that Copernicanism has nothing heretical.

But the damage was done, and the Galileo affair has become a hobbyhorse for positivist thinkers, anticlericals and dogmatists of all stripes. The curtain falls, the hero is painted: Galileo was persecuted, then thrown in prison. History forgets that Galileo, yet one of the examples of the scientific method, provokes and alienates his adversaries too, treating them as mental pygmies, stupid idiots, and other quips; forgetting in the discord the prudence of the experimental approach to the point of alienating his Jesuit supporters.

Yet, the Church was already in the process of accepting the implications of the Copernican revolution: the Jesuits were beginning to reproduce Galileo's experiments and try to improve Copernicus's ideas, bringing dialogue to great scholars like Kepler and Brahe.

Second-to-last mythist nail: "Galileo reduced Man's place in the Universe, since he's no longer at the center!"

Prepare to take a cold shower. Apparently, by moving the center of the Universe from the Earth to the Sun, Galileo would have diminished the importance of Man in the Universe. It's true that today, being at the center of things means you're important. You're THE center, THE beauty, THE best. Unfortunately, that's not how people reasoned at the time. At the time of Galileo, the Earth was at the center of the world because it was the gross base for everything else. The least fine and heaviest elements fell toward the bottom of the cosmos, earth, then water, then air, then fire, and finally the fifth element, which constituted the celestial spheres, the planets and the stars.

This position suited everyone, notably the Greeks: air surrounded the earth, nobler than water and earth. And the ocean floated on the earth, because water was nobler than earth, but less than air. Objects fell downward, because they were made of vulgar and base matter. Fire rose toward the Heavens, because nobler. And all was well.

This surely seems stupid to us. But at the time, it also made sense within Christianity: since Adam's Fall, man was condemned to live at the bottom of the cosmos, in material form.

Conversely, the idea of a heliocentric cosmos only raised more questions: if the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, why does matter fall? Why does fire rise? If the Earth rotates, why don't we feel a constant wind? And if the Earth revolves around the Sun, why don't we see the stars move slightly during the year?

In the Divine Comedy, by Dante, the great medieval poet, the lowest circle of Hell is located... at the center of the Earth. The center of the Earth and Hell were therefore at the center of the Universe. My favorite philosopher and thinker, Saint Thomas Aquinas, had placed, within the framework of his cosmology, the Earth at the center, because it was basely material and gross. Being at the center of things, at the time, was not well regarded⁹. Although false, this myth is easily justifiable: our egocentric vision of things often makes us see the era with our current prejudices; and we often target the old as the village ignoramus.

And to finish... "and yet, it moves". In Italian, "eppur si muove", which would be better translated as "and yet, it moves". A mythical phrase pronounced by Galileo at the end of his trial, once he had abjured his theory... if it were true. Well, if it were true, it would have immediately sent him back to trial for heresy, and the story would have ended like Joan of Arc. The phrase doesn't appear in any of the oldest biographies of Galileo. The first occurrence comes from Giuseppe Baretti, in 1757, more than a century after his death. Not a single document from the time of Galileo's trial mentions it.

In the end, it will only be through academic jealousy and pride of other scientists that Galileo's works will be dragged before the Inquisition's tribunal, and the impact of the politics of the time and the tensions will only have escalated the Copernican condemnation. Nevertheless, nothing excuses the extreme reaction of the church at the time. Things could have happened without clashes and without condemnation on the subject of science.

And it's not by propagating these myths that we serve the Truth.

What can we learn from this story? Already, that if you're a scientist, you won't be remembered if you agree with the current consensus. Moreover, this should teach you that if you want to say your theory is true, you must provide experimental proof, if possible with data (even if you're right).

And if you're Catholic, this will give you good reasons not to insult the Pope (well, if there's an Inquisition in progress).

Much more can be learned. It's especially interesting to ask why should we talk about this story? I've often heard about the Galileo affair, especially at school, and it's only by studying the question in detail that I saw that the story wasn't as simple as one thinks. We tend to think of religion and science as enemies, and even more so today, in a context where dogmatism is resurging. I don't think the men responsible for propagating scientistic myths are intentional liars. I think it's often simpler to believe without verifying, and that's valid for everyone.

Yet it would be easy to mock such credulity, and a lack of desire to research. But in truth, it's surely a fault I have (too) often. And it's an opportunity to reaffirm my position as a Catholic: I don't have to choose among what suits me what position I should think. No.

The duty is to align with the Truth, no matter where it is found.

Let's take the image of Galileo. Because, in the end, it's to him that the last word belongs: he's been made a heretic for some, a liar for others, a hero for others still. Despite his flaws and his somewhat provocative character, having ruffled the touchy authorities of the time, and in the tumult of the trial reacting badly, doing the same as those he reproached for their lack of rigor, he remains a man who had the concern to account for the truth.

And as a good Catholic, he will keep his faith to the end, accompanied by his daughter Virginia, who became Sister Marie-Céleste in the Carmelite order, the contemplative order par excellence, while trying to finish the missing proofs for his work.

The contemplation of Truth, whether scientific, religious or existential, there is the goal of our lives.

Notes

Sources

A big thank you to Tim O'Neil, whose various texts on the Internet and the readings he recommended allowed me to produce the bulk of this post, personal translation with my own additions.

• The Crime of Galileo, 1955, Giorgio de Santillana.
• Robert Bellarmin, Saint and Scholar, 1961, James Brodrick, Westminster, Newman Press*.*
• Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution, 1990, Michael J. Crowe.
• Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, 2010, Ronald L. Numbers.
• "Galileo Galilei" in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 2002, Richard J. Blackwell.
• "Galileo, the Church and the Cosmos" in When Science and Christianity Meet, 2003, David C. Lindberg.
• Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius, 2003, William R. Shea & Mariano Artigas.
• The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, 2005, Owen Gingerich.
• Science and Religion, 1450-1900: From Copernicus to Darwin, 2006, Richard J. Olson.
• The Essential Galileo, 2008, Maurice A. Finnocchiaro.
• The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, 2011, James Hannam.
• The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order, 2011, Robert S. Westman.