Galileo Galilee: Relationship Between Catholic Church And Scientific Progress

In almost all histories and studies of science and religion, a “warfare thesis” has defined the relationship between the Catholic Church and scientific progress. According to this thesis, Galileo Galilee is portrayed as a brave and heroic general, a protector of science, and a martyr for the cause of truth. Likewise, the Church has been stereotyped as an ignorant and backward institution, clinging to her naïve predispositions, archaic philosophy, and unsubstantiated traditions. Though this “warfare thesis” has its merits, it fails to account for the political and social influences causing the decline of the Catholic Church during the time surrounding the Galileo affair. In actuality, the Galileo affair is the reaction of the Roman Catholic Church to its decline during the 17th Century. During this period, the Catholic Church was beginning to feel the weight

of fighting an expensive war to the north.

Meanwhile, back in Rome, she was loosing influence due to challenges presented to her doctrine and teachings by the scientific revolution. In response to these challenges, the Catholic Church attempted to redirect people’s attention away from her more serious problems by finding something she could do to show she still had influence and authority over people’s lives. For the church, attacking Galileo and his ideas was the perfect way to show people that she was just as powerful as she had ever been in the past.

Emerging from the High Medieval and Renaissance Periods, the Catholic Church and the Holy See experienced a decline in wealth, power, and influence. This was due in part to perceived threats from the Protestant Reformation and from the scientific revolution of

the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In response to these threats, Pope Paul III convoked the Council of Trent. To alleviate these concerns, the Catholic Church underwent a Counter-Reformation to streamline her theology and to weed out corruption. The Church believed by reinventing herself Protestants would be more inclined to return to the mother church and that things would resume as they were in the past. Though somewhat successful, the Counter-Reformation did little to facilitate Protestant conversion, and by 1618, all out war between Protestants and Catholics would engulf the Holy Roman Empire. While the Thirty Years’ War would rage to the north, a scientific revolution would consume the minds of intellectuals throughout the rest of Europe. Led by figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, and others, the scientific revolution would not only lead to scientific advances, but it would also cast shadows of skepticism on the Church and her teachings. During this period, the Catholic Church was not only under attack by the protestant kings to the north, but her teachings were under fire from the intellectual community back in Rome. This two-pronged assault would result in her decline, not only on a political level, but on an influential and theological level as well. Feeling the pressure from these attacks on her authority, the church began to search for away to redirect attention away from her state of decline.
Desperate to redirect attention from the attacks on her authority, the Catholic Church began to look for a way to shift attention away from her weakened state to another source. Though ethically questionable, in the past the Catholic Church had often redirect attention from her institutional failures by using her power to attack, discredit, and destroy ideas and cultures that contradicted her philosophy and teachings. Over the years, the Church’s attempt to redirect people’s focus has taken many forms. Incidents such as, the conquest of the Holy Land during the crusades and the weeding out of Jewish and Muslim influences during the inquisitions are just two of the examples of how the Church repeatedly used her power to redirected people’s attention from her declining power. Unlike in the past where the church would use war to redirect people’s attention from her institutional failures; this time the church would attempt to use her remaining influence to discredit the advances of the scientific community. To do this, the church decided that she would attempt to discredit Copernicanism. The church believed that Copernicanism would be an easy target and discrediting this belief would be an easy way to redirect people’s attention away from the declining church.
One might argue that the Galileo affair was an attack on Copernicanism because the Catholic Church had always found heliocentricity heretical. Yet, if this were true, why would the Church wait over 70 years to place Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium on the Index of Forbidden Books? In fact, Copernicus’ book and ideas would not be placed on the Index until 1616, one year after Galileo published his official argument for Copernicanism in his Letter to The Grand Duchess Christina. The correlation between the rise of Copernicanism, the Catholic Church’s distain for Galileo’s teachings, and the decline of the Church’s power is no coincidence. The church was looking to make Galileo an example in order to redirect critics’ her attention away from the church and to have them be critical of him.
Furthermore, during Galileo’s time, the Catholic Church’s Aristotelian view of astronomy was not as dogmatic as the Church had claimed. In laying out the church’s view of heavenly motion, Thomas Aquinas asserted, “The theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained…(yet,) some other theory might explain them” (ST I, 32, ad. 4). As implied by Aquinas, the church accepted Aristotle’s theories as the most likely explanations of celestial motions instead of explanations that where official doctrine. The Church accepted these views because of their explanatory power and not because they necessarily depicted reality.
Despite this, the Catholic Church was intent on convicting Galileo. Doing this, the Church was attacking not his ideas, but rather, demonstrating coercive power to redirect attention from her declining state. Evidence of this is shown by the fact Galileo was placed under house arrest rather than killed for his defiance. During his papacy, Pope Urban VIII, the pope who placed Galileo under house arrest, had an estimated 600 people tortured and killed for heresy. Yet, the Church only placed Galileo under house arrest. This shows that Galileo was being made an example. If Galileo’s actions where truly heretical, he would have been killed with the hundreds of others who where charged with similar impiety. The actions of the Catholic Church were not an act of war against science, but an attempt to redirect attention from the desperate state of decline that the church was experiencing during the beginning of the 17th century.