I finished Redondi’s book on Galileo, possibly the worst written book I have ever encountered. So, for those who are interested, I will try to sum it up in accessible English, and preferably in one paragraph. That will relieve you all from having to read it.
The trouble started in Rome with Galileo’s book ” The Assayer”, published in 1623 . The book was a huge success and enlightened people from the Pope downwards hailed Galileo as a genius. However, the Jesuits and the followers of the old thinking were secretly appalled at Galileo’s support of atomism, although this was only a small part of the book. Transubstantiation had been debated for centuries, and the Jesuits thought that the matter had been settled at the Council of Trent. Galileo’s positive references to atomism once again threatened the teaching on the subject of the Eucharist. Were the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ or were simply they an arrangement of atoms, like water or a cabbage? A secret charge of heresy was made against Galileo. At that moment Galileo was protected by Pope and the establishment, and the charge was suppressed. But later the political situation changed with Protestant successes in the Thirty Years War and the relative power shift in the Vatican towards Spain. The Jesuits then struck. But they wanted to avoid further debate about the eucharist at all costs, so they concentrated on Galileo’s views on the matter of the Earth moving round the sun. It was a no-brainer. Every sensible person could see with their own eyes that the sun went round the Earth. It was thus easy to obtain public support for the heresy charge, which finally silenced the Century’s greatest scientist, and could be said to have effectively ended his life. The subtle attack on the eucharist had been beaten back.
You’re a superbly generous blog-host, slogging through the “worst-written” book in order to save your readers the trouble.
re Galileo: can you enlighten me on this snippet from Wiki? (I don’t know much more about Galileo than the conventional narrative).
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“Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism was controversial within his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or the Tychonic system.[9] He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism due to the absence of an observed stellar parallax.[9] The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and they concluded that it could be supported as only a possibility, not an established fact.[9][10] Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point.[9] He was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.[11][12] ”
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The above sounds a bit strange to me. Does it mean that the issue wasn’t so much heliocentrism (which was in dicey play at the time) as the validity of saying heliocentricity was a “possibility” or a “fact?” So, the house arrest wasn’t over theology but running afoul of the shifting political currents at the time?
Copernicus first proposed that the Earth moved round the sun. He was a heretic in the eyes of the church. Galileo supported Copernicus, but was protected for alluding to this in the early decades of the 17th Century by the Pope and other powerful Cardinals. Despite this a Jesuit enemy filed charges of heresy against Galileo, ostensibly because of his heliocentric views, but in reality because his support of atomism threatened the viability of the Mass. I hope I madethis point in my posting. It is the whole basis of Redondi’s book. The conventional view is that Galileo was charged with Copernicism; Redondi says this is only half the story. But yes, the fact that Galileo was charged formally with heresy has to do withe the changing politics in the Vatican. The basis of the charge is a matter of dispute. I ploughed through Redondi’s book in order to put the dispute in focus.