In the beginning of April, when his examination in person was to commence, it became necessary that he should be removed to the holy office; but instead of committing him, as was the practice, to solitary confinement, he was provided with apartments in the house of the fiscal of the Inquisition. His table was provided by the Tuscan ambassador, and his servant was allowed to attend him at his pleasure, and to sleep in an adjoining apartment. Even this nominal confinement, however, Galileo’s high spirit was unable to brook. An attack of the disease to which he was constitutionally subject contributed to fret and irritate him, and he became impatient for a release from his anxiety as well as from his bondage. Cardinal Barberino seems to have received notice of the state of Galileo’s feelings, and, with a magnanimity which posterity will ever honour, he liberated the philosopher on his own responsibility; and in ten days after his first examination, and on the last day of April, he was restored to the hospitable roof of the Tuscan ambassador.
Though this favour was granted on the condition of his remaining in strict seclusion, Galileo recovered his health, and to a certain degree his usual hilarity, amid the kind attentions of Niccolini and his family; and when the want of exercise had begun to produce symptoms of indisposition, the Tuscan minister obtained for him leave to go into the public gardens in a half-closed carriage.
After the Inquisition had examined Galileo personally, they allowed him a reasonable time for preparing his defence. He felt the difficulty of adducing any thing like a plausible justification of his conduct; and he resorted to an ingenious, though a shallow artifice, which was regarded by the court as an aggravation of the crime. After his first appearance before the Inquisition in 1616, he was publicly and falsely charged by his enemies with having then abjured his opinions; and he was taunted as a criminal who had been actually punished for his offences. As a refutation of these calumnies, Cardinal Bellarmine had given him a certificate in his own handwriting, declaring that he neither abjured his opinions, nor suffered punishment for them; and that the doctrine of the earth’s motion, and the sun’s stability, was only denounced to him as contrary to Scripture, and as one which could not be defended. To this certificate the Cardinal did not add, because he was not called upon to do it, that Galileo was enjoined not to teach in any manner the doctrine thus denounced; and Galileo ingeniously avails himself of this supposed omission, to account for his having, in the lapse of fourteen or sixteen years, forgotten the injunction. He assigned the same excuse for his having omitted to mention this injunction to Riccardi, and to the Inquisitor-General at Florence, when he obtained the licence to print his Dialogues. The court held the production of this certificate to be at once a proof and an aggravation of his offence, because the certificate itself declared that the obnoxious doctrines had been pronounced contrary to the Holy Scriptures.
Having duly weighed the confessions and excuses of their prisoner, and considered the general merits of the case, the Inquisition came to an agreement upon the sentence which they were to pronounce, and appointed the 22d of June as the day on which it was to be delivered. Two days previous to this, Galileo was summoned to appear at the holy office; and on the morning of the 21st, he obeyed the summons. On the 22d of June he was clothed in a penitential dress, and conducted to the convent of Minerva, where the Inquisition was assembled to give judgment. A long and elaborate sentence was pronounced, detailing the former proceedings of the Inquisition, and specifying the offences which he had committed in teaching heretical doctrines, in violating his former pledges, and in obtaining by improper means a license for the printing of his Dialogues. After an invocation of the name of our Saviour, and of the Holy Virgin, Galileo is declared to have brought himself under strong suspicions of heresy, and to have incurred all the censures and penalties which are enjoined against delinquents of this kind; but from all these consequences he is to be held absolved, provided that with a sincere heart, and a faith unfeigned, he abjures and curses the heresies he has cherished, as well as every other heresy against the Catholic church. In order that his offence might not go altogether unpunished, that he might be more cautious in future, and be a warning to others to abstain from similar delinquencies, it was also decreed that his Dialogues should be prohibited by public edict; that he himself should be condemned to the prison of the Inquisition during their pleasure, and that, in the course of the next three years, he should recite once a week the seven penitential psalms.
The ceremony of Galileo’s abjuration was one of exciting interest, and of awful formality. Clothed in the sackcloth of a repentant criminal, the venerable sage fell upon his knees before the assembled Cardinals; and laying his hands upon the Holy Evangelists, he invoked the Divine aid in abjuring and detesting, and vowing never again to teach, the doctrine of the earth’s motion, and of the sun’s stability. He pledged himself that he would never again, either in words or in writing, propagate such heresies; and he swore that he would fulfil and observe the penances which had been inflicted upon him.[35] At the conclusion of this ceremony, in which he recited his abjuration word for word, and then signed it, he was conveyed, in conformity with his sentence, to the prison of the Inquisition.
The account which we have now given of the trial and the sentence of Galileo, is pregnant with the deepest interest and instruction. Human nature is here drawn in its darkest colouring; and in surveying the melancholy picture, it is difficult to decide whether religion or philosophy has been most degraded. While we witness the presumptuous priest pronouncing infallible the decrees of his own erring judgment, we see the high-minded philosopher abjuring the eternal and immutable truths which he had himself the glory of establishing. In the ignorance and prejudices of the age—in a too literal interpretation of the language of Scripture—in a mistaken respect for the errors that had become venerable from their antiquity—and in the peculiar position which Galileo had taken among the avowed enemies of the church, we may find the elements of an apology, poor though it be, for the conduct of the Inquisition. But what excuse can we devise for the humiliating confession and abjuration of Galileo? Why did this master-spirit of the age—this high-priest of the stars—this representative of science—this hoary sage, whose career of glory was near its consummation—why did he reject the crown of martyrdom which he had himself coveted, and which, plaited with immortal laurels, was about to descend upon his head? If, in place of disavowing the laws of Nature, and surrendering in his own person the intellectual dignity of his species, he had boldly asserted the truth of his opinions, and confided his character to posterity, and his cause to an all-ruling Providence, he would have strung up the hair-suspended sabre, and disarmed for ever the hostility which threatened to overwhelm him. The philosopher, however, was supported only by philosophy; and in the love of truth he found a miserable substitute for the hopes of the martyr. Galileo cowered under the fear of man, and his submission was the salvation of the church. The sword of the Inquisition descended on his prostrate neck; and though its stroke was not physical, yet it fell with a moral influence fatal to the character of its victim, and to the dignity of science.
In studying with attention this portion of scientific history, the reader will not fail to perceive that the Church of Rome was driven into a dilemma, from which the submission and abjuration of Galileo could alone extricate it. He who confesses a crime and denounces its atrocity, not only sanctions but inflicts the punishment which is annexed to it. Had Galileo declared his innocence, and avowed his sentiments, and had he appealed to the past conduct of the Church itself, to the acknowledged opinions of its dignitaries, and even to the acts of its pontiffs, he would have at once confounded his accusers, and escaped from their toils. After Copernicus, himself a catholic priest, had openly maintained the motion of the earth, and the stability of the sun:—after he had dedicated the work which advocated these opinions to Pope Paul III., on the express ground that the authority of the pontiff might silence the calumnies of those who attacked these opinions by arguments drawn from Scripture:—after the Cardinal Schonberg and the Bishop of Culm had urged Copernicus to publish the new doctrines;—and after the Bishop of Ermeland had erected a monument to commemorate his great discoveries;—how could the Church of Rome have appealed to its pontifical decrees as the ground of persecuting and punishing Galileo? Even in later times, the same doctrines had been propagated with entire toleration: Nay, in the very year of Galileo’s first persecution, Paul Anthony Foscarinus, a learned Carmelite monk, wrote a pamphlet, in which he illustrates and defends the mobility of the earth, and endeavours to reconcile to this new doctrine the passages of Scripture which had been employed to subvert it. This very singular production was dated from the Carmelite convent at Naples; was dedicated to the very reverend Sebastian Fantoni, general of the Carmelite order; and, sanctioned by the ecclesiastical authorities, it was published at Naples in 1615, the very year of the first persecution of Galileo.
Nor was this the only defence of the Copernican system which issued from the bosom of the Church. Thomas Campanella, a Calabrian monk, published, in 1622, “An Apology for Galileo,” and he even dedicates it to D. Boniface, Cardinal of Cajeta. Nay, it appears from the dedication, that he undertook the work at the command of the Cardinal, and that the examination of the question had been entrusted to the Cardinal by the Holy Senate. After an able defence of his friend, Campanella refers, at the conclusion of his apology, to the suppression of Galileo’s writings, and justly observes, that the effect of such a measure would be to make them more generally read, and more highly esteemed. The boldness of the apologist, however, is wisely tempered with the humility of the ecclesiastic, and he concludes his work with the declaration, that in all his opinions, whether written or to be written, he submits himself to the opinions of the Holy Mother Church of Rome and to the judgment of his superiors.
By these proceedings of the dignitaries, as well as the clergy of the Church of Rome, which had been tolerated for more than a century, the decrees of the pontiffs against the doctrine of the earth’s motion were virtually repealed; and Galileo might have pleaded them with success in arrest of judgment. Unfortunately, however, for himself and for science, he acted otherwise. By admitting their authority, he revived in fresh force these obsolete and obnoxious enactments; and, by yielding to their power, he riveted for another century the almost broken chains of spiritual despotism.
It is a curious fact in the annals of heresy and sedition, that opinions maintained with impunity by one individual, have, in the same age, brought others to the stake or to the scaffold. The results of deep research or extravagant speculation seldom provoke hostility, when meekly announced as the deductions of reason or the convictions of conscience. As the dreams of a recluse or of an enthusiast, they may excite pity or call forth contempt; but, like seed quietly cast into the earth, they will rot and germinate according to the vitality with which they are endowed. But, if new and startling opinions are thrown in the face of the community—if they are uttered in triumph or in insult—in contempt of public opinion, or in derision of cherished errors, they lose the comeliness of truth in the rancour of their propagation; and they are like seed scattered in a hurricane, which only irritates and blinds the husbandman. Had Galileo concluded his System of the World with the quiet peroration of his apologist Campanella, and dedicated it to the Pope, it might have stood in the library of the Vatican, beside the cherished though equally heretical volume of Copernicus.