The Roman Inquisition

Trying Galileo

Thomas F. Mayer

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812290325
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa rinascimentale

Few legal events loom as large in early modern history as the trial of Galileo. Frequently cast as a heroic scientist martyred to religion or as a scapegoat of papal politics, Galileo undoubtedly stood at a watershed moment in the political maneuvering of a powerful church. But to fully understand how and why Galileo came to be condemned by the papal courts—and what role he played in his own downfall—it is necessary to examine the trial within the context of inquisitorial law.With this final installment in his magisterial trilogy on the seventeenth-century Roman Inquisition, Thomas F. Mayer has provided the first comprehensive study of the legal proceedings against Galileo. By the time of the trial, the Roman Inquisition had become an extensive corporatized body with direct authority over local courts and decades of documented jurisprudence. Drawing deeply from those legal archives as well as correspondence and other printed material, Mayer has traced the legal procedure from Galileo's first precept in 1616 to his formal trial in 1633. With an astonishing mastery of the legal underpinnings and bureaucratic workings of inquisitorial law, Mayer's work compares the course of legal events to other possible outcomes within due process, showing where the trial departed from standard procedure as well as what available recourse Galileo had to shift its direction. The Roman Inquisition: Trying Galileo presents a detailed and corrective reconstruction of the actions both in the courtroom and behind the scenes that led to one of history's most notorious verdicts.

CHAPTER 1

The Florentine Opposition

The Roman Inquisition showed interest in Galileo several times before formal proceedings began in 1615. His mother may have denounced him to the Holy Office in Florence for calling her names.¹ Next, one of his household servants in Padua denounced him for practicing judicial astrology. The Venetians quashed the proceedings.² In 1611 during its protracted investigation of Galileo’s Paduan friend the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini, the Congregation ordered its archives searched to see what it had against Galileo.³ The Inquisition’s most serious interest came in 1612–1613 when it somewhat unusually subjected Galileo’s Sunspot Letters to prepublication censorship. It objected most seriously to Galileo’s attempt to interpret scripture.⁴ As always, Galileo paid the Inquisition’s interventions only as much heed as he had to and seems to have taken away nothing whatever by way of a lesson. The pattern for his trial was set.

The Florentine Opposition

Almost as soon as Galileo arrived in Florence from Padua in 1610, opposition arose to him and his ideas. It reached critical mass about eighteen months after the publication in 1613 of Sunspot Letters, its target. The conspiracy grew among a tight-knit group of Florentine Dominicans, probably with ramifications to the top of the Florentine social and economic hierarchy. The conspirators used two basic approaches: preaching, the Dominicans’ forte; and denunciation to the Inquisition in Rome, an institution they dominated.

Raffaello Delle Colombe

Pride of place in launching the campaign from the pulpit against Galileo has always gone to Tommaso Caccini (see the next chapter), but priority probably belongs to his fellow Florentine Dominican Raffaelo delle Colombe (1563–1627).⁵ Luigi Guerrini calls Delle Colombe “the most important Dominican active in Florence in the first two and a half decades of the seventeenth century” as well as “one of the principal collaborators” of Archbishop Alessandro Marzi Medici in both his general efforts to control Florentine culture and more specifically to rein in Galileo.⁶ His brother Ludovico delle Colombe, a more obscure figure, has usually been taken as the ringleader of the Florentine cabal.⁷ Raffaello Delle Colombe entered the Dominican order on 6 November 1577 at Santa Maria Novella, studying theology in Perugia before preaching there, in Rome, and elsewhere in the Roman province.⁸ He authored or contributed to three books, all of them about saints.⁹ He probably spent considerable time in Santa Maria Novella before taking up permanent residence in 1612.¹⁰ Elected prior in 1620, he resigned in 1623. The convent’s library benefited greatly from monetary donations he arranged from his brothers and the 7,000 books Archbishop Francesco Bonciani of Pisa bequeathed in late 1619.¹¹

Between 1613 and 1627, Delle Colombe published five large volumes of sermons, all by the Florentine house of Sermartelli. The first, dedicated to Marzi Medici’s nephew, Delle prediche sopra tutto gli Evangeli dell’anno (Sermons on all the Gospels of the Year), appeared in 1613 (IT\ICCU\RLZE\034354) (2nd ed. 1619; IT\ICCU\UM1E\004084), although its permissions date from 1609 and 1610, including one from Emanuele Ximenes, S.J., a prominent member of the opposition to Galileo, as we shall see in the next chapter.¹² Next came Prediche della Quaresima (Lent Sermons) (IT\ICCU\BVEE\056825), published in 1615, although all the approvals are of 1613. They are in themselves of interest. The first of 3 July 1613 is by Dominican Michele Arrighi (1567–1634), then prior of Santa Maria Novella and teacher and friend of Giacinto Stefani, the man who would review Galileo’s Dialogo in Florence.¹³ The Jesuit Claudio Seripando’s opinion at Archbishop Marzi Medici’s request is dated 31 August 1613; the archbishop’s own approval “if so it pleases the reverend master father inquisitor” rests on Seripando’s.¹⁴ Seripando had been involved with Rodrigo Alidosi during Alidosi’s legation to Prague in 1605–1607 and later cooperated with Lelio Medici, the inquisitor of Florence, in a proposed abjuration of one of Alidosi’s Bohemian Lutheran clients.¹⁵ Then “by order of the Holy Office,” comes an opinion dated 2 September 1613 “del nostro Collegio della Compagnia di Giesù,” Emanuele Ximenes again. All in all, a nicely balanced set of licenses. The second edition of 1622 (IT\ICCU\UM1E\004089) was dedicated to Federico Borromeo and included a third volume, Prediche aggiunte a quella della Quaresima [Sermons added to those for Lent] (IT\ICCU\TO0E\028863), dedicated to Desiderio Scaglia, another Dominican but much more important an Inquisitor. Volume 4, Prediche sopra le solennità della beatissima madre di Dio [Sermons for the Solemnities of the the Most Blessed Mother of God] (1619; IT\ICCU\CFIE\016595), was dedicated to another Dominican and Inquisitor Agostino Galamini, the man who directed Galileo’s prosecution in 1616. These two dedications cannot have been casual. Last came Dupplicato avvento di prediche [Doubled Advent Sermons, one set for religious, the other for the laity] (1627; IT\ICCU\CFIE\016608).¹⁶

Delle Colombe’s preaching campaign had two phases according to Guerrini. Between 1608 and 1610 when Galileo arrived in Florence, he attacked Copernicans in general.¹⁷ In a sermon dating from before 1613, Delle Colombe broadened his criticism of worldly wisdom into harsh criticism of a long list of fools, ending with “Copernicans”:

The¹⁸ men of the world are so far from this humility that there is nothing they study more than to hide than their ignorance nor to show than “science;” and indeed human “science” if it is not tempered with the water of divine wisdom is nothing other than a drunkenness…. Pride has disturbed their vision…. Thus if whoever drinks the wine of the world’s science, if he does not mix some water of which it is written “she … will give him the water of wisdom to drink” [Ecclesiasticus 15.3] will give into a delirium and commit insanities. What greater insanity than to deny God as Pythagoras [did] or divine providence as Ibn Rush [did], and similar things? What greater foolishness than to make the soul mortal, as Galen [did]? … What [is] more reasonable than to see “You [Yahweh] have made the world, firm, unshakeable” [Ps. 92/3.2] and with all this that the Copernicans [Copernici] say that the earth moves and the heavens stay still, because the sun is the center of the earth, for which reason it can be said of these that they have dizziness, “On them Yahweh has poured out a spirit of giddiness … as a drunkard slithers in his vomit” [an edited version of Isaiah 19.14]

Beginning in 1612, Delle Colombe’s target became Galileo and—as Guerrini notes—specifically his ideas about sunspots.¹⁹ On at least two occasions, Delle Colombe inserted direct criticisms of them into his sermons, one explicit, the other thinly veiled.²⁰ The first came in a sermon for the second day of the first week of Lent, probably—given the dates of all the permissions for the volume of Lent sermons listed above—26 February 1613, just before Sunspot Letters appeared, suggesting a highly organized campaign.²¹ The printed version highlighted the target with a heavy-handed marginal reference to “Galileo in On Sunspots.” The passage comes near the sermon’s end, rhetorically its most important section:

While²² the world lasts our ignorance also lasts, we know little of others and nothing of our own selves. The time will come that the fabric will be explained, that the development of this heart will be unfolded, the hiding place of this brain will be opened. And as St. Peter Damian said “Everyone’s every secret will be revealed.”²³ That ingenious Florentine mathematician of ours [Galileo] laughs at the ancients who made the sun the most clear and clean of even the smallest spot, whence they formed the proverb “To seek a spot on the sun.”²⁴ But he, with the instrument called by him telescope makes visible that it has its regular spots, as by observations of days and months he had demonstrated. But this more truly God does, because “The heavens are not of the world in His sight.”²⁵ If spots are found in the suns of the just, do you think that they will be found in the moons of the unjust?²⁶

The indirect assault came in a more sensitive context, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, probably on 8 December 1615, just as the first phase of Galileo’s trial approached its denoument and from a much more prominent pulpit, that of the cathedral of Florence, the first time Delle Colombe preached there.

It²⁷ was Seneca’s thought that the mirror was invented to allow contemplating the sun. It did not seem a fitting thing that man could not consider the beauty of the greatest light that appears in the theatre of the world. But because the mortal eye, for the weaknesses of its vision, cannot fix its gaze on it for its too great light, at least it can be stared at in a clear crystal behind which the sun presents to us its beautiful image. Therefore an ingenious Academic took for his device a mirror in the face of the sun with the motto “It shows what is received.” [“Receptum exhibet.”]²⁸ That means that he had carved in his spirit I do not know what kind of beloved sun. But what would be better for Mary? Who could fixedly look at the infinite light of the Divine Sun, were it not for this virginal mirror, that in itself conceives it [the light] and renders it to the world? “Born to us, given to us from an intact virgin?”²⁹ This is “let what is received be shown.” For one who seeks defects where there are none, is it not to be said to him “he seeks a spot in the sun?” The sun is without spot, and the mother of the sun without spot. “From whom Jesus was born.”³⁰

Yet like Domenico Gori, Delle Colombe was not entirely an old unreconstruct. While he often referred to traditional cosmology, he also cited the work of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Clavius.³¹

Dominican Science and Theology

That Delle Colombe knew Clavius’s work should not surprise us. Florentine Dominicans enjoyed a deep theological and scientific culture, as Guerrini has shown in two books devoted to broadening our understanding of that culture and its role in the opposition to Galileo, especially in the preaching campaign of Delle Colombe, Caccini, and Niccolò Lorini (the last not much more than mentioned). Following Eugenio Garin, Guerrini emphasizes the quality of science available at both San Marco and Santa Maria Novella right through the early seventeenth century.³² The key figure in the construction of the Dominicans’ distinctive anti-Copernicanism is Giovanni Maria Tolosani who in his “De veritate sacrae scripturae” (1546) had provided all the ammunition his confreres needed to attack Copernicus.³³ Guerrini stresses, almost certainly too much, that Tolosani’s work provided “the theoretical basis on which the discourse of the censors (for the most part Dominicans) was developed in the proceeding [against Galileo] of 1616.”³⁴ As Tolosani’s work’s title suggests, the problem lay in the contradiction between De revolutionibus and scripture.³⁵

Niccolò Lorini, Turbulent Priest

As damaging as Delle Colombe’s sermons might have been and however important his role in the conspiracy against Galileo, he never took as active a role as two other Florentine Dominicans. The most egregious of them was Tommaso Caccini (see the next two chapters). Lorini had greater stature (ca. 1544–?after 1617).³⁶ He was much older than Caccini, but age never made him diplomatic. Born to a Florentine noble family probably from Mugello, after entering the Dominican order at San Marco (not Santa Maria Novella as is universally said) in 1561, he next appears in Genoa in 1577, probably preaching against the plague.³⁷ If so, this was the first of a number of sermons he delivered in his youth, including one for the first Sunday of Advent 1585 in the Sistine Chapel before the pope himself that earned him an appointment as apostolic preacher; he was already a reader and general preacher in the Dominicans’ Roman province.³⁸ The text was published at least twice, originally by the papal printer.³⁹ This was Lorini’s second printed sermon, the first coming the previous year after being preached on Al...