The Heresy of Galileo

The Heresy of Galileo

Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, not for his own brilliant theories, but because

he stood up for his belief in Copernicus's theory that the earth was not, as the Church insisted, the

center of the universe, but that rather, the universe is heliocentric. Galileo was a man of

tremendous intellect and imagination living in a era dominated by the Catholic Church, which

attempted to control the people by dictating their own version of "reality." Any person who

publicly questioned Church doctrine ran the chance of condemnation and punishment. If man

could think, man could question, and the Church could lose its authority over the masses. This

could not be tolerated in the 17th century, when the Church had the power to dictate "reality."

Copernicus probably avoided a similar fate by confining his opinions to his students and the

university milieu, and in fact his theories were not published until the time of his death.

To be tried by the Inquisition was something that nobody could take lightly. Although in

Galileo's time the Inquisition was becoming more and more lenient, it was known to have used

torture in the past and to have sent many heretics to burn at the stake. As late as 1600, this fate

had befallen the Italian thinker Giordano Bruno, a one-time Dominican friar who had adopted a

pantheistic philosophy of nature.

From the summer of 1605, Galileo was private tutor of mathematics to young Prince

Cosimo de' Medici, son of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Teacher and pupil became sincerely

attached to each other by mutual affection and deference, and this bond lasted to the end of

Galileo's life. Galileo remained a good friend of the Grand Duke as well. In the summer of 16...

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...book, De

Revolutionibus, which had been dedicated to a Pope, and which the Pope had accepted, and with

which the Church had found no fault until Galileo had started to present it as reality, was

condemned and prohibited until it should be corrected. Yet, the Roman Catholic Church had

taken no action against Copernicus's books or his ideas until Galileo undertook his campaign to

"convert" the theologians. At the hands of Galileo, the heliocentric system threatened the

geocentric and, much more serious, God's creation was becoming an object of direct human

observation which could be interpreted without the help of the Scriptures or of religion. In short,

Galileo was condemned because he could not keep his opinions to himself and could not resist the

temptation to expose the ignorance, deceit, and manipulation of the powerful religious leaders of

the time.