but rather tried to convince Galileo that he was in error.
Yet so kind was he that Galileo went back to Florence with the hope and belief that he could bring out his great work, "Dialogues on the Two Principal Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Copernican," without opposition from the church. In this book, Galileo gave the results of scientific research and discovery in the half century preceding, using such clear yet brilliant style in writing as to make the work attractive even to the unlearned.
It was ready for publication in March, 1630, but to be sure that the pope did not object, Galileo was urged to go in person to Rome. He went and presented the matter to Urban, who gave his consent provided that the title should show that the Copernican system was treated as a hypothesis merely, and that he, the pope, should write the closing argument.
Rather than forego the publication of that upon which he had worked for years, Galileo consented, and returned to Florence. A license to publish was then obtained from the Inquisitor-General, and the Vicar-General of Florence, after great delay. A second and a third time the papal authorities wished to look over the manuscript. Two years went slowly by.
Other anxieties came to the man of sixty-eight, besides the long delay. The impecunious Michelangelo sent his wife, seven children, and a German nurse, to the home of Galileo, to be taken care of. The eldest nephew was sent to Rome to study music. He was found to be obstinate, impudent, and dissolute, "wicked ways" which his weak and indulgent father said "he did not learn from me, or any one else belonging to him. It must have been the fault of his wet nurse!"
Galileo's son Vincenzo had married and brought his wife home to live. Strange fortune for this man of genius! Strange that he must have helpless relatives, and constant pecuniary troubles. Most great lives are as pathetic as they are great.
As ever, the one gleam of light was the daily letter from Maria Celeste, in which she expressed a tenderness beyond what any daughter ever had for a father. "But I do not know how to express myself, except by saying that I love you better than myself. For, after God, I belong to you; and your kindnesses are so numberless that I feel I could put my life in peril, were it to save you from any trouble, excepting only that I would not offend His Divine Majesty."
Finally Galileo moved to Arcetri, over against the convent, to be near the one who alone satisfied his heart.
In January, 1632, the "Dialogues" appeared. Copies were sent to his friends and disciples throughout Italy. The whole country applauded, and at last Galileo seemed to have won the homage he had so long deserved.
But a storm was gathering. Enemies were at work prejudicing the mind of Urban VIII., making him feel that Galileo had wrought evil to the church. At once an order came from the Inquisition to secure every copy in the booksellers' shops throughout Italy, and to forward all copies to Rome.
In October of the same year of publication, Galileo was summoned to appear at Rome, to answer to that terror of past centuries, the charge of heresy. His friends urged that he was old and feeble, and that he would die on the journey, but Urban's commands were peremptory.
Galileo was deeply depressed by the summons, and wrote a friend: "This vexes me so much that it makes me curse the time devoted to these studies, in which I strove and hoped to deviate somewhat from the beaten track generally pursued by learned men. I not only repent having given the world a portion of my writings, but feel inclined to suppress those still in hand, and to give them to the flames, and thus satisfy the longing desire of my enemies, to whom my ideas are so inconvenient."
On January 20, 1633, the decrepit old man set out in a litter for Rome, arriving on February 13. On April 12, he was brought before the Inquisition, and briefly examined and then remanded to prison, though treated with great leniency. The anxiety and deprivation from outdoor exercise brought on illness, and he was confined to his bed till led a second time before the Inquisition, April 30.
Weak, aged, in fear of torture, he made the melancholy confession that his "error had been one of vainglorious ambition, and pure ignorance and inadvertence." Pure ignorance! from the man who had studied for fifty years all that the world knew of science! But he recalled how men had died at the stake for offending the church. The world is not full of men and women who can suffer death for their convictions, however much we may admire such courage. On May 10, he was summoned a third time before the Inquisition, and told that he had eight days in which to write his defence. In touching language he stated how the book had been examined and re examined by the authorities, so that there might be nothing heterodox in it; and then he urged them to consider his age and feeble health.
A fourth time he came before the Holy Congregation, June 21, and was asked whether he held that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and that the earth is not the centre, and that it moves. He replied, "I do not hold, and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it; for the rest, I am here in your hands, – do with me what you please."
And then June 22, in the forenoon, in the large hall of the Dominican Convent of St. Maria sopra la Minerva, in the presence of cardinals and prelates, he heard his sentence.
"The proposition that the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from its place is absurd, and false philosophically, and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to the Holy Scripture.
"The proposition that the earth is not the centre of the world and immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically; and theologically considered, at least, erroneous in faith… Invoking, therefore, the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His most glorious mother and ever Virgin Mary … we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, that you, the said Galileo, by reason of the matters adduced in process, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself, in the judgment of this Holy Office, vehemently suspected of heresy, – namely, of having believed and held the doctrine, which is false and contrary to the sacred and divine Scriptures, – that the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the earth moves and is not the centre of the world… We condemn you to the formal prison of this Holy Office during our pleasure, and, by way of salutary penance, we enjoin that for three years to come you repeat once a week the seven Penitential Psalms."
Galileo was also required to "abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies." And then the white-haired man of seventy, humbly kneeling before the whole assembly, made the pitiful abjuration of his belief. "I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and, generally, all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church."
Pitiful spectacle of intolerance! If we of this nineteenth century have learned to tolerate and treat with respect the beliefs of others though widely divergent from our own, perhaps this wretched drama was not acted in vain.
It has been said that Galileo exclaimed as he rose from his feet, "E pur si muove," "It moves, for all that," but this would have been well nigh an impossibility, in the midst of men who would instantly have taken him to a dungeon, and the story is no longer believed.
On July 9, poor Galileo was allowed to leave Rome for Siena, where he stayed five months in the house of the archbishop, and then became a prisoner in his own house at Arcetri, with strict injunctions that he was "not to entertain friends, nor to allow the assemblage of many at a time."
He wrote sadly to Maria Celeste, "My name is erased from the book of the living." Tender words came back, saying that it seemed "a thousand years" since she had seen him, and that she would recite the seven penitential psalms for him, "to save you the trouble of remembering it."
In less than a year, sweet Maria Celeste had said the last psalms for him. She died April 1, 1634, at thirty-three years of age, leaving Galileo heart-broken; "a woman," he said, "of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."
He went to work on another book, but he said, pathetically, "I hear her constantly calling me!" Beautiful spirit, that will forever shed a halo around the name of Galileo Galilei!
In the summer of 1636, he completed his "Dialogues on Motion," and sent it to Leyden for publication. The next year he made his last discovery, known as the moon's librations.
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