Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmine--consultor of the Holy Office, head of the Roman College, Cardinal, former Archbishop of Capua--turned to his guest with a weary smile.
"So, Maffeo, any words of wisdom about Galileo? He'll be in Rome next week, and we have arranged a visit."
Maffeo Barberini, scion of one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in Italy, a Cardinal too--one day to be Pope, Bellarmine was sure--removed a grape pit from his tongue. "Only what you already know--he is right."
"Pity more of our people cannot grasp that," Bellarmine said. "The nonsense that has been produced in our own College--that the moon is really pure, perfect, sublimely spherical as Aristotle held, and the mountains and craters seen through Galileo's telescope are but imperfections far below that heavenly invisible surface--you would think it was 615 not 1615, and Rome had just been sacked of all common sense, all reason!"
"Ah, yes." Barberini chuckled. "And, as I recall, Galileo had a good answer to that one: if we accept that heavenly surfaces are invisible, then we could just as easily agree that the real surface of the moon, constructed of that same magical substance, actually rises in towering mountains ten times higher than his telescope has seen."
"He is clever," Bellarmine said, unsmiling. "And that is what makes him dangerous. I have tried to convey to him the thought, the path, that his mathematics, his observations, may be right--that we may welcome them, rejoice in them, as an improvement over Ptolemy's epicycles--but that the underlying, everlasting truth is just as it ever was."
"And what truth is that?" Barberini asked.
"That is no doubt the question that troubles Galileo," Bellarmine replied, "and why he sometimes gives the appearance of accepting our arguments, yet in his truest soul rejects them. It is because we ourselves are unsure of just what the underlying, everlasting truth really is."
"As we have good reason to be," Barberini said. "But that is our burden--not the world's. And part of our burden is to keep the world--not only the physical world, but the souls of its people--stable."
"Which brings us back to the problem of Galileo," Bellarmine said, sadly. "His theories, his publications, presented to the world without our mediation, cannot help but sow confusion in the common soul."
"Have you implied to him anything at all of the Instruments?" Barberini asked, as delicately as he could manage.
"No! I have not! Therein lies the road that was taken with Giordano Bruno. And it did no good--it did worse than no good. In the end..." Bellarmine could not bring himself to finish.
"In the end, our Holy Church had to kill him," Barberini said. "Still, the result need not be the same with Galileo. He is a different kind of man--more practical, more of a scientist than a mystic like Bruno. He may see a different kind of lesson in the Instruments."
"No," Bellarmine insisted. "I will not have it."
Barberini permitted himself the slightest of smiles.
)
Why did Galileo really give in to the Church, and recant his Copernican view that the Earth revolved around the sun? Did the Church have some evidence, from the distant future, that was more persuasive than even Galileo's telescopic observations?
