Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible

Richard J. Blackwell

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1991
• ISBN:
  9780268158934
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

Considered the paradigm case of the troubled interaction between science and religion, the conflict between Galileo and the Church continues to generate new research and lively debate. Richard J. Blackwell offers a fresh approach to the Galileo case, using as his primary focus the biblical and ecclesiastical issues that were the battleground for the celebrated confrontation. Blackwell's research in the Vatican manuscript collection and the Jesuit archives in Rome enables him to re-create a vivid picture of the trends and counter-trends that influenced leading Catholic thinkers of the period: the conservative reaction to the Reformation, the role of authority in biblical exegesis and in guarding orthodoxy from the inroads of "unbridled spirits, " and the position taken by Cardinal Bellarmine and the Jesuits in attempting to weigh the discoveries of the new science in the context of traditional philosophy and theology. A centerpiece of Blackwell's investigation is his careful reading of the brief treatise Letter on the Motion of the Earth by Paolo Antonio Foscarini, a Carmelite scholar, arguing for the compatibility of the Copernican system with the Bible. Blackwell appends the first modern translation into English of this important and neglected document, which was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1616. Though there were differing and competing theories of biblical interpretation advocated in Galileo's time—the legacy of the Council of Trent, the views of Cardinal Bellarmine, the most influential churchman of his time, and, finally, the claims of authority and obedience that weakened the abillity of Jesuit scientists to support the new science—all contributed to the eventual condemnation of Galileo in 1633. Blackwell argues convincingly that the maintenance of ecclesiastical authority, not the scientific issues themselves, led to that tragic trial.

CHAPTER

1

Trent and Beyond

Nicholas Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was first published in May 1543. Tradition has it that the first copy arrived in Copernicus’s hands on 24 May, the day he died. Two and a half years later, in December 1545, the First Session of the Council of Trent was convened under Pope Paul III to deal with much needed reforms in the Roman Catholic Church. At that time these two events were utterly unrelated to each other. But the two lines of forces which they set in motion were destined to intersect. The collision occurred on 5 March 1616 when the Congregation of the Index, an administrative office established in the Roman Curia as a result of the Council of Trent, issued a condemnation of Copernicus’s book “until corrected.” How and why did these two initially independent lines of action come ultimately into conflict? To what extent was this conflict fortuitous and to what extent was it predestined? To answer these questions we need first to look closely at the Council of Trent and how it affected the views of theologians before Galileo entered the drama.

THE FOURTH SESSION OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT

The initial occasion for convening the Council of Trent was Martin Luther’s break with Rome in 1519. In many previous instances of crisis in the long history of the Church, the response had been to convene a council to settle the issues in dispute. In this spirit the Imperial Diet held at Nuremberg in 1523 called for a “free Christian Council” on German soil to deal with the questions which had split the Church. The request was repeated in 1524. The primary goal was to restore the unity of Christendom. However, an extraordinarily complex series of religious, political, diplomatic, and military disputes among various European states, with each other and with the popes of the time, postponed the opening of a council for a quarter of a century.¹ As these years passed, the potential for reunification became less and less viable. As a result when the Council of Trent finally did take place (1545–63), the focus had shifted to the goals of clarifying Catholic dogma and reforming the discipline, training, and life-style of the clergy. The eighteen years of the council were interrupted by two lengthy adjournments, first of four years (1547–51), and then of ten years (1552–62). These delays not only further decreased the likelihood of reunification but saw increasing distrust and open hostility between the Catholic and Protestant camps.

For the present purposes it is important to emphasize that matters of natural philosophy, or of what we would now call the natural sciences, in no way were of concern in the debates at the council. At best they were mentioned only casually, if at all. The primary thrust of the council can be seen in a brief list of the central topics of decision: the books of Scripture and the role of tradition in the Church, original sin, justification and divine grace, each of the seven sacraments, indulgences, the mass, the education, morals, and preaching duties of the clergy, the jurisdiction and obligation of residence for bishops. These matters clearly centered on doctrinal and disciplinary issues in the life of the Church. However, the decisions arrived at on Scripture and tradition, originally made in response to the challenges of Luther and the other reformers, would later become related to the new ideas introduced by Copernicus. It is this aspect of the Council of Trent which calls for our attention.

Before we turn to the specific conclusions of the council, a few remarks about its procedures may be helpful. The pope (first Paul III, then Julius III, and later Pius IV) convened the council and approved its decrees and canons afterwards (without any alterations in this case), but did not himself participate in the discussions and voting. The pope was represented by one or more legates who served, in effect, as presiding officers of the proceedings. The voting members were the cardinals, bishops, and the heads of the various religious orders in attendance, each having one vote. Numerous theologians and canon lawyers served as advisers to the voting members. A date was set in advance for a formal meeting, called a session, at which the official decisions would be made on an announced set of topics. Each session was preceded by weeks, sometimes months, of preparatory work which centered around plenary meetings of all voting members, called General Congregations, in which debate ranged widely and from which the formal documents stating the decrees and canons gradually emerged.² These latter documents, after the formal vote at the appropriate session, constitute the specific decisions of the council. The first three sessions at the Council of Trent dealt solely with matters of organization, procedure, and agenda. The main organizational dispute was whether to treat dogma or Church reform and discipline first. This was resolved by an agreement to deal with one set of topics from each area at each session. The Fourth Session was the first to deal with substantive matters, and the chosen topic was the status of Scripture, revelation, and tradition. This topic was undoubtedly chosen to be the first order of business because it focused on a central challenge posed by the reformers.

The Fourth Session, held on 8 April 1546, approved two decrees, the first dealing with the notion of tradition and with determining the authentic books contained in the Scriptures, and the second with the edition and interpretation of the Bible.³ These two documents are of major importance both in the history of the Church and in the Galileo affair. One of the effects of the first decree was to determine for the Catholic Church which of the books of the ancient religious cultures are to be taken as canonical, i.e., as writings inspired by the Holy Spirit and thus as expressing God’s revelation. This, of course, was not the first attempt at listing the canonical books in the history of the Church — such attempts date back to 180 A.D. — and had previously been dealt with in a decree of the Council of Florence (4 February 1441). But the matter had become urgent because Luther had raised the issue of the content of the canon, and the Council Fathers clearly felt obliged to respond. The decision made at Trent, which in effect reaffirmed the decree of the Council of Florence, has defined the Catholic edition of the Bible ever since.

Closely related to this is the question of which edition of the Scriptures should be recommended for practical use. For centuries the Latin Vulgate edition, originally prepared by St. Jerome in the years 390–405 A.D., had been the standard Latin text in the West, and this was now declared to be “in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions, held as authentic.” The Council Fathers also discussed at length in the General Congregations the questions of the need to reexamine the original language Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible and of the wisdom of using vernacular translations of the Scriptures, but chose not to speak to either of these points in the decrees. The needed revision of the Latin Vulgate edition was left by the council to the pope’s later initiative. A series of three papal commissions subsequently worked on this project with the result that in 1592 there appeared the Clementine edition, which, although still not the fully corrected version envisioned at Trent, has served as the Catholic Bible into the twentieth century. It is interesting to note that in 1591 Cardinal Bellarmine recommended, and actively worked on, the final version of the Clementine edition.⁴

Of much greater historical importance, however, was the statement of the principle of tradition in the first decree. The relevant passage reads as follows:

The Council also clearly maintains that these truths and rules are contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ Himself or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Spirit dictating, have come down to us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand. Following then the examples of the orthodox Fathers, it receives and venerates with a feeling of equal piety and reverence both all the books of the Old and New Testaments, since one God is the author of both, and also the traditions themselves, whether they relate to faith or to morals, as having been dictated either orally by Christ or by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in the Catholic Church in unbroken succession.⁵

A number of points need to be carefully noted in this famous text. First its main thrust asserts the existence of “unwritten traditions.” Second these traditions, i.e., things “transmitted as it were from hand to hand,” are asserted to be either words spoken by Christ himself or by the Apostles themselves under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As such they are taken to be divinely revealed truths, and to have been passed on from generation to generation within the Church in an “unbroken succession” up to the present day. Third, since God is the author of both the written revelation (i.e., Scripture) and the unwritten Apostolic traditions, each is to be received with “equal piety and reverence” (pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia), and not merely with “similar” respect, a word used in earlier drafts but replaced by “equal” (pari) in one of the preparatory General Congregations. As we said above, the main point made by the council in this declaration on tradition was to assert the existence of a set of unwritten Apostolic traditions. This was intended to counter the view of Luther that revelation, and thereby salvation, comes through Scripture alone (sola Scriptura). This passage is thus seen to have its full significance only when understood in this Counter-Reformation context.

Furthermore it should be carefully noted that, in the passage of the first decree quoted above, we have emphasized the word “and.” That single word covers a complex theological dispute which erupted at the council, and which had impact in the Galileo affair. The problem debated by the bishops was the following: If we grant that divine revelation comes to us under two forms, the written Scriptures and the unwritten traditions, should we say (1) that only part of the revelation is contained in each, or (2) that the whole of revelation is contained in each?⁶ It is certain that the first alternative was considered in detail in the General Congregations since the earlier versions of the decree contain the terms “partly … partly …” (partim … partim …). This would mean that tradition contains some revealed truths which are not contained in the Scriptures (and vice versa). But this met with strong opposition in the General Congregations by advocates of the second alternative. If the whole of revelation is contained in both Scripture and tradition, then neither contains a revealed truth not found in the other. This is closer to Luther’s “Scripture alone” principle, although it is fundamentally quite different from it since it does not reject tradition as a carrier of revelation, the main point of dispute in this area between the reformers and the council.

Faced with this dispute about the double form of revelation, the council simply sidestepped the issue by replacing “partly … partly …” with “and” in the final version of the decree. In so doing, they chose not to speak to the question. Their purposes, i.e., rejecting Luther’s “Scripture alone” principle, were adequately served by stating that both Scripture and tradition express God’s revelation without specifying what content they may or may not share. This unresolved issue has been debated by Catholic theologians ever since, the most recent instance being in the decade immediately following Pope Pius XII’s proclamation in 1950 of the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven as a dogma of the Catholic faith.⁷

In the latter half of the sixteenth century most of the theologians, including Bellarmine,⁸ understood the Fourth Session of Trent in the “partly … partly …” interpretation. In fact this was what gave rise to the “two sources” doctrine in the history of theology. But if this reading is granted, then one places an increased importance on the Fathers of the Church (e.g., Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria). For they constituted the chief links in the unbroken chain of succession from which one acquires some distinctive divinely revealed truths not otherwise known in the Scriptures. This helps to understand the prominence in the Galileo affair of the great respect for the common agreement of the Fathers, the significance of which may otherwise be missed. This was not merely a general respect for revered ancestors; it was rather a respect for what was understood to be the conduit for a unique body of truth revealed by God, which was to be held in a reverence equal, according to Trent, to that of Scripture itself. Whether the theologians contemporary with Galileo were correct in their understanding of the Fourth Session is not relevant at present. The fact is that that is what many, if not all, of them thought. The important consequent was that the “unanimous agreement of the Fathers on matters pertaining to faith and morals” was used by them as a touchstone to determine the content of the Apostolic tradition of revelation from God.

As far as the Galileo affair is concerned, a still more significant decision of the council is to be found in the second paragraph of the second decree. The relevant passage reads as follows:

Furthermore, to control petulant spirits, the Council decrees that, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and meaning, has held and does hold, or even contrary to the unanimous agreement of the Fathers, even though such interpretations should never at any time be published. Those who do otherwise shall be identified by the ordinaries and punished in accordance with the penalties prescribed by the law.⁹

Again, to be properly understood, this passage must be read in the context of the Reformation. It is primarily a rejection of Luther’s doctrine of private interpretation, i.e., that the locus of determining the meaning of Scripture is in the individual person. Instead it is decreed that the Church is to serve as the judge of their “true sense and interpretation.” This passage is not about dogma but about authority. Note also that the “unanimous agreement of the Fathers” is mentioned explicitly, and is consistent with the principle of tradition affirmed in the first decree. As in the first decree, the...