Cover of Fr. Paschal Scotti’s book on Galileo

For our “Voices” column this month, we remind our readers of one of our community’s published authors, Fr. Paschal Scotti. In addition to his work teaching history at the School, he maintains his ongoing research, a voracious reader and an astute follower of current events. His book on Galileo, published by Ignatius Press in 2017, added to ongoing scholarship on that famous and controversial figure from the history of science and of faith. In such a discussion, Fr. Paschal enters a battlefield familiar to many, yet misunderstood or inadequately understood by most. We provide here some excerpts from his book in order to hear some of his “voice”, and to sketch out his project and some of the historical insights he has gained. We also thereby encourage our readers to consider picking up a copy of the book, which is highly readable and informative on topics that remain of critical importance to the church today.

Fr. Paschal begins by swinging open the gates on an entire “Galileo industry” and how Galileo has taken on a symbolic significance at times not well tethered to historically complex realities: “Galileo is one of those iconic figures in history for whom there is endless fascination. Besides an abundant scholarly literature, the ‘Galileo Industry’, as one author put it, there also has been great general interest in him, as we see in a stream of biographies that still come out and in the international bestseller of more than a dozen years ago, Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter (1), which sparked the 2002 PBS/Nova television program Galileo's Battle for the Heavens. Nor have as many scientists inspired serious works of art, as we see with Philip Glass’ 2002 opera Galileo Galilei and Bertold Brecht’s Galileo, revived again in early 2012, off-Broadway, with F. Murray Abraham in the title role. Galileo’s significance lies far beyond his importance in the history of science. Invariably, it is his brush with the Inquisition, his trial and condemnation by the Catholic Church in 1633, that seizes the imagination. Over and over again, it is the ‘Galileo Affair’ that people remember. So much so, that when National Geographic put out a children's book on Galileo in 2005, it could not but entitle the book Galileo: The Genius Who Faced the Inquisition.”

“All of us have grown up with the idea of the warfare between science and religion. While the idea began with the Enlightenment, it reached its high watermark in the Victorian period. Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), the ‘Pope of Science’, pushed the military metaphor in his attempt to professionalize science, moving it from a part of Christian apologetics, the preserve of Anglican gentlemen and clerics, or rather, gentlemen clerics, into a hard-edged secular discipline financed by the state, and ordered to public usefulness.(2) Only by discrediting the religious culture of the traditional, Anglican-landed Establishment could his science come into its own. Who can forget his pugnacious line, "Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules."(3) This polarization, or at least the attempt to create polarization, was part of the means by which he achieved it; and it was as much about class, power, and prestige as about the pursuit of truth.(4) …” (Galileo Revisited, pp. 9-10)
Ana Castillo in conversation with Fr. Paschal Scotti at Humanitas SymposiumA closer look at the Galileo Affair becomes bound up with a need to reassess the Church’s historical and actual relationship to the scientific project. Fr. Paschal writes: “Recent scholarship has been much more positive about the Church’s role in science. The respected historian of science Edward Grant rather sees Christianity as supportive of science and the Christian Middle Ages as laying the foundations for the Scientific Revolution.7 Despite the clear religious orientation of the Middle Ages, science was given enormous institutional support in that uniquely medieval creation, the universities, where the arts curriculum was basically a scientific one and whose main job was the training of clerics. This respect for science was equally true of astronomy as of any other science. As J. L. Heilbron put it in his study of churches as solar observatories: ‘The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.’” (8)

“…In history context is everything. The Galileo Affair cannot be understood without understanding its context. While it has been cast as a clash of ideas, cosmological and theological, it is preeminently a clash between individuals. As has been pointed out, strictly speaking, ideas of themselves cannot clash; only people can.12 And when people are involved, personality, personal interests, particular circumstances, passions – and so much more – play an enormous role. History is always about the particular and the human, and the particular and the human are always messy. The aim of this book is neither polemical nor apologetic. It seeks neither heroes and villains nor inevitable results based on social, economic, and cultural forces. Nothing is inevitable in human affairs unless people make it so. It is my hope that this book will, standing on the shoulders of so many others, help elucidate that. As it has been justly said, the past is another country, and it needs its guides to be understood properly. The philosopher of science Ernan McMullin has stated that ‘had Galileo made his case for Copernicanism a century earlier or a century later, it seems unlikely that it would have evoked the strong response it did on the part of the Roman theologians.’(13) One of the things to be gained by a better knowledge of the context is why that is so.” (Galileo Revisited, pp. 11-12)

The book then presents Fr. Paschal’s exploration of this context, and he proposes that it is “an interesting ride.” The journey takes us through five chapters, opening in the first chapter with coverage of the political background of Italy at the time of Galileo, particularly the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Venetian Republic, and the Papal States. This encompasses the religious situation in Italy during the Counter-Reformation, and Catholicism’s “organs of control,” namely the Roman Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books. The second chapter looks more closely at Galileo’s life up to his discoveries with the telescope, the publication of the Starry Messenger, and “his triumphant visit to Rome.” The book then, thirdly, looks at the history of astronomy as well as the “sister science” of astrology at this time. The fourth and fifth chapters trace the denouement of the Galileo Affair, through his encounters with is critics, the 1616 condemnation of Copernicanism, and the election of Pope Urban VIII, a friend of Galileo. This leads into discussion of the publication of “his great work on cosmology,” Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), and his trial (1633).

In his conclusion, Fr. Paschal sketches out some of the qualities of Galileo’s character that have come more fully into view through his research. He comments on the defense of Galileo offered by his former student, Nicolas-Clause Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), who felt strongly that the punishment of Galileo “would be compared by posterity with the persecution of Socrates, the ancient Athenian sage and the father of Western Philosophy,” noting that Peiresc “was the first of many to make this comparison of Galileo with Socrates.” Fr. Paschal proposes a more nuanced understanding:
Fr. Paschal Scotti
“Like Socrates, Galileo was a charismatic teacher who attracted many enthusiastic disciples and won them over to a wholly new view of the world. Like Socrates, Galileo was an indefatigable seeker of truth, a man possessed with an amazing verbal and dialectical dexterity ready to challenge the complacent with their unreflective conformity, a gadfly, ready to puncture the pretensions of the so-called wise and self-satisfied. Like Socrates, Galileo too had a fundamental optimism and belief in reason, a buoyant exuberance and irreverence that could be to some extremely attractive but to others irritating and off-putting. Finally, like Socrates, Galileo felt he was on a divine mission, mission that he could neither refuse nor moderate. Unlike Socrates, however, he drank no hemlock. And while the suffering of Galileo had been severe, and should not be forgotten, there is still something ignoble if understandable in his capitulation and perjury, in his denial of the real intentions of his great work and his abject abjuration before the Inquisition. Lacking in Socrates also – at least in the highly stylized dialogues of Plato by which we know him – were Galileo’s vanity and inflated ego, his ambition, his need to protect his scientific preeminence and status against all comers, and the self-destructive pettiness and nastiness that mar his otherwise highly admirable personality.

“It seems to me that if one had to compare Galileo to anyone in the classical world, it might be, rather, to Oedipus than to Socrates. The legendary figure of Oedipus, made forever memorable through the great play of Sophocles, was also an extraordinary man. He too was a man of great intelligence, brave and ingenious, as we see in his standing up to the monstrous Sphinx and the solving of its riddle. He was the man of action, incapable of passivity, unrelenting in his investigations, in his pursuit of truth, even when warned that it would be far better to leave things alone. And like Galileo, his intemperate zeal and pride in his own ability would bring on his destruction, a disaster that need not have happened, leaving him in the end bowed and blind , though unbroken, an object of pity, but also of respect, heroic in stature through his tragedy.” (Galileo Revisited, pp. 267-268)

Concerning the Galileo Affair overall, Fr. Paschal goes on to note, “…there is more than plenty of blame to go around, and Galileo was far from the only culprit.” His analysis finds the Catholic Church, notably Pope Urban VIII, sorely lacking in any response of merit to Galileo’s ideas, a church unable to “respond creatively” as it had in the early church’s encounter with pagan philosophies or in the thirteenth century with the revival of Aristotelianism. In entering the fray of not only historical debate over the “real” Galileo, Fr. Paschal thus also becomes engaged in a valuable reflection on the church’s historical relationship to science, the vicissitudes in the value of its theological capabilities, and the difficult ensnarement of personal or political agendas in that history. He thus adds a valuable voice to this discussion, so pertinent to the complexities of the relationship of faith and science now faced by the church.

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NOTES (abridged from the book):
(1) Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Walker)
(2) Gilley & Loades, “Thomas Henry Huxley” (Jrnl. of Religion 61, 1981)
(3) Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Addison-Wesley)
(4) Frank M. Turner, “The Victorian Conflict Between Science and Religion” (Isis 69, 1978)
(8) J.L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church (Harvard Univ. Press)
(13) Ernan McMullin, “Galileo on Science and Scripture” (Cambridge Companion to Galileo)