The Crime of Galileo by Giorgio de Santillana (PDF)

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“In the gallery of what might be called the martyrs of thought, the image of Galileo recanting before the Italian Inquisition stirs the minds of educated modern men second only to the picture of Socrates drinking the Hemlock. That image of Galileo is out of focus . . . because it has been distorted by three centuries of rationalist prejudice and clerical polemics. To refocus it clearly, within the logic of its own time . . . de Santillana has written The Crime of Galileo, a masterly intellectual whodunit which traces not the life but the mental footsteps of Galileo on his road to personal tragedy.”—Time

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From the Back Cover Scientific endeavor and social authority, in one form or another, are characteristics of man’s life on his planet that are expected to endure for as long as we can see ahead. In this essay, which aims at analyzing their complex relations, we intend to go at length into the episode which provides, namely, the trial of Galileo and the circumstances that brought it about. But, as we work out the general conditions attendant and dissimilarities occur with the further phase of conflict which is being played out in our time.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The author has carefully reviewed the original primary sources for the events that took place. The author painstakingly pieced together the relevant documentry evidence to produce and account of what actually happened rather than supporting one or the other side. This was very refreshing. Unfortunately, the author makes reading difficult by being verbose, using long confusing sentences and often quoting in foreign languages with out putting in a translation. Getting through the book was definately difficult, but the quality of the research made the effort worthwhile. Often an author doesn’t have time to do everything necessary for a great book and must make choices of what to concentrate on. I am very glad this author’s choice came down on the side of telling the story as accurately as possible.

⭐This book actually got me back into reading. It is frickin awesome. The way Santillana weaves the primary sources together with Galileo’s “criminal history” is amazing!

⭐Very interesting with factual details rather than preconceived opinions. Quite a lesson in the misconduct of some men who clearly misused their positions. And that caused terrible harm to Galileo and to an important social institution. If you look, you can see the same kind of thing happening today. I find it puzzling how a person can choose to commit such lies and distortions of what another person has really said or done – but here is a record from history and its also widespread in the news today.

⭐I don’t like getting used books, but this one is an older book and was available only that way. It worked out very well—it’s in good shape!

⭐In 2015, it was reported that the Large Hadron Collider could disprove the Big Bang Theory. Imagine what that could mean to the tenured professors of physics and astronomy at MIT and CalTech who have made their professional careers espousing the Big Bang Theory?! Decades of research, countless peer-reviewed articles, dozens of major conference presentations, innumerable class lectures – all completely and utterly refuted in a single, devastating swoop! The horror! An entire academic life flushed down the virtual drain. One suspects that the lions of the Bing Bang would not go down without a fight, challenging the new findings strenuously at every turn, as if their very lives (professionally speaking) depended on it.And that’s precisely what happened some four centuries ago, according to Giorgio de Santillana here in his 1955 classic “The Crime of Galileo,” when Galileo’s new telescope and the resulting discoveries confirmed the heliocentric Copernican system and disproved the long held Ptolemaic theory that the earth was the center of the universe. The author claims that, “Like Galileo, Copernicus had foreseen resistance not at all from the Church authorities but from vested academic interests.” In the 1590s, the general academic consensus was that nature had a certain order about life. For instance, rocks fall and fire rises. There were two distinct entities – heaven and earth – that were subject to different rules. Galileo challenged this fundamental academic assertion.The author’s thesis is simple and compelling; his supporting documentation, however, is less convincing. The overall story of Galileo’s trial is fascinating and absolutely deserves to be retold; the present version presented here, however, leaves much to be desired, even though the author coldly claims that pre-existing literature (before 1950) on Galileo’s trial ranges “from average casual incompetence to prevarication and plain filth.”There are two main parts to de Santillana’s narrative, although his book is not broken down that way.First, there is the story of Galileo’s early discoveries and the subtle reaction of the church in 1616. The astronomer quickly determined that the best way to out flank the entrenched academic elite with his new and revolutionary Copernican evidence was to co-opt the ruling political elites. Thus, he named the moons of Jupiter after the House of Medici and wrote about his discoveries in common Italian rather than the more academic Latin. Contemporaries argued that Galileo wrote in the common vernacular to win over the common man against the Church. De Santillana explicitly rejects this charge.What made Galileo so effective, according to the author, was neither his telescopes nor his theories, but rather his persuasive personality and his exceptional ability to write. He was a communicator and an entertainer – a potent blend in any society at any time. “You have a way of bewitching people,” the Pope supposedly claimed with alarm. It was not so much what Galileo was saying, although that was important, but rather the way he was saying it: in colloquial Italian rather than Latin aimed at the political ruling class and the common man rather than the academic elites and with a felicity that defied traditional scientific treatises. “In short,” the author writes, “this man was a troublemaker.”In February 1616 the Papacy issued a decree denouncing Galileo’s theories, calling them “foolish and absurd,” banning all books and lectures arguing that the sun was the center of the solar system on pain of imprisonment.The inquisition of Galileo in Rome led by Cardinal Bellarmine in 1616 remains something of a mystery to this day. Or, as the author puts it, “a curious inconclusive oddment in history.” And yet “it is, and will remain to the end, the kingpin of the case” against Galileo. The scientist was evidently humble and cooperative. Official records of the proceedings have disappeared. However, the author suggests that Galileo was under no injunction not to speak of his findings and opinions, as would later be claimed. In 1616, the Church’s Council of Trent had proclaimed: “Petulant minds must be restrained from interpreting Scripture against the authority of tradition in matters that pertain to faith and morals. This was good news (of sorts) for Galileo. ”So long as his teachings remained purely a matter of mathematics and theory, everything was copasetic, so long as the Catholic Church was concerned.Galileo laid low, so to speak, after 1616, but the sudden and unexpected appearance of comets in 1618, just as the Thirty Years’ War began, brought the issue of heliocentrism back into the front of the public mind. Galileo gently re-emerged on the public scene in 1623 with the election of Pope Urban VIII, a man from Florence and a committed patron of the sciences. Moreover, Bellarmine was for several years dead. Therefore, things looked rather auspicious, politically speaking, when Galileo entered the public debate on the nature of the comets.Despite his friendliness to scientists before his became Urban VIII, the new pope now directed Galileo that he was free to speculate on the nature of the universe so long as he conceded his theories were clearly and obviously wrong no matter how convincing the physical evidence because “God is capable of great mysteries.”In 1629, confident that he was politically in the clear, Galileo published his famous Dialogue on Great World Systems, “clearly one of the great works in western world history,” according to the author. Galileo tells the story of the Copernican system via a fictional dialogue between three characters: Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio.Pope Urban VIII was by 1630 mired in the Christian religious civil war known as The Thirty Years War – and he was losing on the foreign policy front. And now here came Galileo, writing in Italian for a lay audience and heaping ridicule on the Church’s position of heliocentrism. It was the worst possible time politically for the Church to face a challenge to its teachings and authority. Meanwhile, Galileo himself was increasingly feeble with old age; the summons to Rome to answer questions before the pontiff seemed almost a death sentence.The epic trial of April 1633 pivoted on the questionable injunction of 1616, that was supposedly delivered verbally by Bellarmine, but was determined to mean that Galileo agreed not to “hold, defend, nor teach that opinion (Copernicus’ heliocentrism) in any way whatsoever.” The injunction of 1616 issued by Bellarmine is the linchpin of he whole case against Galileo according to de Santillana. It literally all came down to the words, not anywhere verified, that he agreed not to teach heliocentrism “in anyway whatsoever,” to include putting the arguments in the mouth of a fictional character who ostensibly loses the debate, as was the case in the Dialogue. According the author: “the authorities had gone off the deep end.”Two themes come into full. First, the injuction of 1616 was a flimsy reed upon which to lean when attacking Galileo for treason. And, de Santillana concludes, “[its] falsification is beyond doubt.” Second, the Church held a deep and personal animus against Galileo because of his “vain, glorious ambition,” further marked by his temerity of publishing in Italian, thus making fools of the Church’s official position.Galileo called his theories “dreams, nullities, paralogisms, and chimeras” in a failed attempt to escape conviction in 1631. He figured out too late “…that the authorities were not interested in truth but only in authority.”Galileo lived 8 full years after the sentence of 1633, much to everyone’s surprise, and albeit under house arrest. To his last breath Galileo refused to concede or confess to any heresy and remained, as always, a committed and devout Catholic.

⭐I read this book several decades ago and it stands out as one of the best books of its kind. It is not a rehash of the common wisdom that the trial of Galileo simply reveals a conflict between science and religion but, rather, shows that the socio-political atmosphere around this case could never have been that simple. At that time, science did not exist apart from the church, and academia in general did not exist apart from the church. The top scientists of the day were often also churchmen. At first, some of them supported Galileo’s findings, but they eventually turned against him because he questioned the then-current scientific model of the solar system, which was held by both the church and the scientific community. The implication for all times is that whoever holds the most power, so that scientists are beholden to them, will control the politics of science regardless of what the scientific method reveals is the nature of reality. This won’t always happen, but when the crunch comes and a particular narrative is politically required, scientists will be called upon to decide between masters. All too often, they will easily decide that the easier way to go makes the most sense. Indeed, at the time, Galileo and Copernicus were so far ahead of their time that not all of the evidence supported their revolutionary ideas, making it all the easier for established scientists to reject their new claims.De Santillana also shows that the powers-that-be will not necessarily require the top members of the scientific community to be the ones who publicly oppose the “science heretic” (a term that I think Isaac Asimov may have coined). De Santillana shows that Galileo’s most popular opponent was a scurrilous priest who preached against Galileo in terms that were as absurd and outrageous as they were ignorant. (He claimed, for example, that Galileo did not see moons around other planets but that, rather, he saw spots before his eyes due to syphilis.)Comparison to other cases of science heretics show similar patterns although De Santillana does not go into comparison. For example, Darwin was also officially opposed by established scientists in his day, but the most popular opponents of evolution were non-scientists who made outrageous and ignorant arguments. In both cases (Galileo and Darwin) the pop culture attacks were egged on by more respectable figures behind the scenes.

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