O Lord my God, Thou art great indeed…Thou fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved for ever.
PSALM 104: I, 5
‘Now, getting back to my story,’ Castelli went on,
I entered into the chambers of her Highness, and there I found the Grand Duke, Madama Cristina and the Archduchess, Don Antonio [de’ Medici], Don Paolo Giordano [Orsini], and Doctor Boscaglia. Madama began, after some questions about myself, to argue the Holy Scripture against me. Thereupon, after having made suitable disclaimers, I commenced to play the theologian with such assurance and dignity that it would have done you good to hear me. Don Antonio assisted me, giving me such heart that instead of being dismayed by the majesty of their Highnesses I carried things off like a paladin. I quite won over the Grand Duke and his Archduchess, while Don Paolo came to my assistance with a very apt quotation from the Scripture. Only Madama remained against me, but from her manner I judged that she did this only to hear my replies. Professor Boscaglia said never a word.
The troubling news of Madama Cristina’s displeasure inspired an immediate response from Galileo. Even more than he regretted her opposition, he dreaded the drawing of battle lines between science and Scripture. Personally, he saw no conflict between the two. In the long letter he wrote back to Castelli on 21 December 1613, he probed the relationship of discovered truth in Nature to revealed truth in the Bible.
‘As to the first general question of Madama Cristina, it seems to me that it was most prudently propounded to you by her, and conceded and established by you, that Holy Scripture cannot err and the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. I should only have added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways…when they would base themselves always on the literal meaning of the words. For in this wise not only many contradictions would be apparent, but even grave heresies and blasphemies, since then it would be necessary to give God hands and feet and eyes, and human and bodily emotions such as anger, regret, hatred and sometimes forgetfulness of things past, and ignorance of the future.’
These literary devices had been inserted into the Bible for the sake of the masses, Galileo insisted, to aid their understanding of matters pertaining to their salvation. In the same way, biblical language had also simplified certain physical effects in Nature, to conform to common experience. ‘Holy Scripture and Nature’, Galileo declared, ‘are both emanations from the divine word: the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter the observant executrix of God’s commands.’
Thus no truth discovered in Nature could contradict the deep truth of Holy Writ. Even Madama Cristina’s objection regarding the Book of Joshua could be put to rest in terms of the Sun-centred universe; indeed, Copernicus made more sense of the passage than either Aristotle or Ptolemy, as Galileo spent almost half of this letter explaining.
On this day, when the Lord delivered up the Amorrites to the Israelites, Joshua prayed to the Lord, and said in the presence of Israel: Stand still, O sun at Gabhaon, O moon, in the valley of Aialon! And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, while the nation took vengeance on its foe. Is this not recorded in the Book of Hashar? The sun halted in the middle of the sky; not for a whole day did it resume its swift course. Never before or since was there a day like this, when the Lord obeyed the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.
JOSH. 10: 12–14
The Ptolemaic system granted the Sun two motions. One of these, a slow annual progression from west to east, belonged strictly to the Sun itself. The other, more apparent, motion of the Sun across the sky over the course of the day – most probably the motion Joshua had sought to halt – actually belonged to the Ptolemaic Primum Mobile, the sphere of the highest sky, which spun all the other spheres containing Sun, Moon, planets and stars around the Earth every twenty-four hours. God’s stopping only the Sun would not have achieved Joshua’s desire. On the contrary, it would have made night arrive about four minutes early.
As Copernicus viewed the sky, however, the passage of day to night resulted from the turning of the Earth. Galileo agreed with Copernicus that the Earth somehow drew this motion from the Sun. Galileo had further observed the Sun to have its own monthly rotation, which he discovered during his studies of sunspots. Just as the light of the Sun illuminated all the planets, so too its motion energised them to pursue their orbits. Therefore, if God had stopped the Sun’s rotation, the Earth would have stopped, too, and the day stretched out to accommodate Joshua’s needs.
Later Galileo would point out that when the Sun stood still in the biblical account, it did so ‘in the middle of the sky’ – precisely where the Copernican system placed it. This reference to location could not be taken to mean the Sun had been standing in the high noontime position, for then Joshua would have found time enough to fight his battle without praying for a miracle to prolong the day.
Despite the strength of his argument, Galileo personally wished to abandon all such astronomical interpretations, on the grounds that the Bible spoke to a more important purpose. As he had once heard the late Vatican librarian Cesare Cardinal Baronio remark, the Bible was a book about how one goes to Heaven – not how Heaven goes.
‘I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation,’ Galileo continued his letter to Castelli, ‘such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.’
Castelli shared this exquisite exposition with friends and colleagues, who hand-copied it and forwarded it numerous times. Galileo now returned to predicting the positions of the Medicean satellites and to penning responses to various published attacks against his own published works. When his health faltered in March, Castelli, who had been begging Galileo to take better care of himself, stepped in to help him.
In the early days of summer, at the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, Virginia and Livia began to wear the dark-brown religious habits of the Franciscan orders. Although both children were still too young to take their vows, mother abbess Suor Ludovica Vinta told the ailing Galileo that she desired to see them appropriately outfitted before she relinquished her elected office.
Young girls received into the monastery before the age required by law shall have their hair cut off round and, their secular dress being laid aside, shall be clothed in religious garb as it shall seem fitting to the Abbess. But when they have reached the age required by law, they shall make their profession clothed after the manner of the others.
THE RULE OF SAINT CLARE, chapter II
Meanwhile Galileo’s letter to Castelli continued to circulate, travelling from hand to hand, and eventually falling into the wrong hands. On 21 December 1614, exactly one year to the day after Galileo wrote the letter, he found himself denounced from the pulpit of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, right in the city of Florence, by Tommaso Caccini, a hotheaded young Dominican priest with ties to the ‘pigeon league’.
Men of Galilee, why do ye stand looking up to heaven?
ACTS I: II
Beginning his sermon with this barb, Caccini moved quickly to the biblical text for that Advent Sunday, which happened to come from the Book of Joshua, and included the ‘Stand still, O sun’ command that had sparked Madama Cristina’s original complaint. Caccini wound up branding Galileo, Galileo’s followers, and all mathematicians in general ‘practitioners of diabolical arts…enemies of true religion’.
The vitriol of the language brought Caccini a reprimand, and Galileo a written apology from the preacher’s Dominican superior. But soon another Florentine Dominican, Niccolò