Part 10 (1/2)
This young man had now come to the throne as Cosmo II., and to him Galileo wrote saying how much he should like more time and leisure, how full he was of discoveries if he only had the chance of a reasonable income without the necessity of consuming so large a portion of his time in elementary teaching, and practically asking to be removed to some position in the Court. Nothing was done for a time, but negotiations proceeded, and soon after the discovery of Jupiter's satellites Cosmo wrote making a generous offer, which Galileo gladly and enthusiastically accepted, and at once left Padua for Florence. All his subsequent discoveries date from Florence.
Thus closed his brilliant and happy career as a professor at the University of Padua. He had been treated well: his pay had become larger than that of any Professor of Mathematics up to that time; and, as you know, immediately after his invention of the telescope the Venetian Senate, in a fit of enthusiasm, had doubled it and secured it to him for life wherever he was. To throw up his chair and leave the place the very next year scarcely seems a strictly honourable procedure. It was legal enough no doubt, and it is easy for small men to criticize a great one, but nevertheless I think we must admit that it is a step such as a man with a keen sense of honour would hardly have taken.
One quite feels and sympathizes with the temptation. Not emolument, but leisure; freedom from hara.s.sing engagements and constant teaching, and liberty to prosecute his studies day and night without interference: this was the golden prospect before him. He yielded, but one cannot help wis.h.i.+ng he had not.
As it turned out it was a false step--the first false step of his public career. When made it was irretrievable, and it led to great misery.
At first it seemed brilliant enough. The great philosopher of the Tuscan Court was courted and flattered by princes and n.o.bles, he enjoyed a world-wide reputation, lived as luxuriously as he cared for, had his time all to himself, and lectured but very seldom, on great occasions or to a few crowned heads.
His position was in fact a.n.a.logous to that of Tycho Brahe in his island of Huen.
Misfortune overtook both. In Tycho's case it arose mainly from the death of his patron. In Galileo's it was due to a more insidious cause, to understand which cause aright we must remember the political divisions of Italy at that date.
Tuscany was a Papal State, and thought there was by no means free.
Venice was a free republic, and was even hostile to the Papacy. In 1606 the Pope had placed it under an interdict. In reply it had ejected every Jesuit.
Out of this atmosphere of comparative enlightenment and freedom into that hotbed of mediaevalism and superst.i.tion went Galileo with his eyes open. Keen was the regret of his Paduan and Venetian friends; bitter were their remonstrances and exhortations. But he was determined to go, and, not without turning some of his old friends into enemies, he went.
Seldom has such a man made so great a mistake: never, I suppose, has one been so cruelly punished for it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 51.--Map of Italy.]
We must remember, however, that Galileo, though by no means a saint, was yet a really religious man, a devout Catholic and thorough adherent of the Church, so that he would have no dislike to place himself under her sway. Moreover, he had been born a Tuscan, his family had lived at Florence or Pisa, and it felt like going home. His theological att.i.tude is worthy of notice, for he was not in the least a sceptic. He quite acquiesces in the authority of the Bible, especially in all matters concerning faith and conduct; as to its statements in scientific matters, he argues that we are so liable to misinterpret their meaning that it is really easier to examine Nature for truth in scientific matters, and that when direct observation and Scripture seem to clash, it is because of our fallacious interpretation of one or both of them.
He is, in fact, what one now calls a ”reconciler.”
It is curious to find such a man prosecuted for heresy, when to-day his opinions are those of the orthodox among the orthodox. But so it ever is, and the heresy of one generation becomes the commonplace of the next.
He accepts Joshua's miracle, for instance, not as a striking poem, but as a literal fact; and he points out how much more simply it could be done on the Copernican system by stopping the earth's rotation for a short time, than by stopping the sun and moon and all the host of heaven as on the old Ptolemaic system, or again by stopping only the sun and not any of the other bodies, and so throwing astronomy all wrong.
This reads to us like satire, but no doubt it was his genuine opinion.
These Scriptural reconciliations of his, however, angered the religious authorities still more. They said it was bad enough for this heretic to try and upset old _scientific_ beliefs, and to spoil the face of _Nature_ with his infidel discoveries, but at least he might leave the Bible alone; and they addressed an indignant remonstrance to Rome, to protect it from the hands of ignorant laymen.
Thus, wherever he turned he encountered hostility. Of course he had many friends--some of them powerful like Cosmo, all of them faithful and sincere. But against the power of Rome what could they do? Cosmo dared no more than remonstrate, and ultimately his successor had to refrain from even this, so enchained and bound was the spirit of the rulers of those days; and so when his day of tribulation came he stood alone and helpless in the midst of his enemies.
You may wonder, perhaps, why this man should excite so much more hostility than many another man who was suffered to believe and teach much the same doctrines unmolested. But no other man had made such brilliant and exciting discoveries. No man stood so prominently forward in the eyes of all Christendom as the champion of the new doctrines. No other man stated them so clearly and forcibly, nor drove them home with such brilliant and telling ill.u.s.trations.
And again, there was the memory of his early conflict with the Aristotelians at Pisa, of his scornful and successful refutation of their absurdities. All this made him specially obnoxious to the Aristotelian Jesuits in their double capacity both of priests and of philosophers, and they singled him out for relentless official persecution.
Not yet, however, is he much troubled by them. The chief men at Rome have not yet moved. Messages, however, keep going up from Tuscany to Rome respecting the teachings of this man, and of the harm he is doing by his pertinacious preaching of the Copernican doctrine that the earth moves.
At length, in 1615, Pope Paul V. wrote requesting him to come to Rome to explain his views. He went, was well received, made a special friend of Cardinal Barberino--an accomplished man in high position, who became in fact the next Pope. Galileo showed cardinals and others his telescope, and to as many as would look through it he showed Jupiter's satellites and his other discoveries. He had a most successful visit. He talked, he harangued, he held forth in the midst of fifteen or twenty disputants at once, confounding his opponents and putting them to shame.
His method was to let the opposite arguments be stated as fully and completely as possible, himself aiding, and often adducing the most forcible and plausible arguments against his own views; and then, all having been well stated, he would proceed to utterly undermine and demolish the whole fabric, and bring out the truth in such a way as to convince all honest minds. It was this habit that made him such a formidable antagonist. He never shrank from meeting an opposing argument, never sought to ignore it, or cloak it in a cloud of words.
Every hostile argument he seemed to delight in, as a foe to be crushed, and the better and stronger they sounded the more he liked them. He knew many of them well, he invented a number more, and had he chosen could have out-argued the stoutest Aristotelian on his own grounds. Thus did he lead his adversaries on, almost like Socrates, only to ultimately overwhelm them in a more hopeless rout. All this in Rome too, in the heart of the Catholic world. Had he been worldly-wise, he would certainly have kept silent and un.o.btrusive till he had leave to go away again. But he felt like an apostle of the new doctrines, whose mission it was to proclaim them even in this centre of the world and of the Church.
Well, he had an audience with the Pope--a chat an hour long--and the two parted good friends, mutually pleased with each other.
He writes that he is all right now, and might return home when he liked.