#more fun times w/my history degree and my work on early modern scriptural interpretation

[azurish]

Friend, I was painting a simplistic account and did not get into the nuances you (somehow, in boundless energy) have expanded upon. But if you had read the links (they were mere further reading, not meant to be true sources - see my new post for the original documents) you would have seen they said what you did - the point was, he was talking about how the bible was to be interpreted, and he didn't have that authority. We're literally agreeing

First off, I really do appreciate your sending such a polite ask!  I enjoyed getting to stretch my history muscles in writing my response to your post: Galileo’s relationship with Scripture is very closely related to a dissertation proposal I’m working on, so this was really just two or three hours delving down a research rabbit hole I’d’ve had to go down next year anyways; and early modern Scriptural interpretation is not just what I study, it’s also something I find fascinating.  I apologize if I’ve gone a bit overboard, but - I’m nerdy enough that engaging with this is both fun for me and good for my productivity on my actual research?  So: thanks for that!

OK, so: I’m afraid we’re still not agreeing.  Although on the surface, it’s true that we both partially agree that Galileo got in trouble for talking about Biblical interpretation when the church reserved to itself the authority to do so, we still disagree on some critical aspects of the matter.  I don’t agree that Galileo didn’t have the “authority” to do what he was doing; and furthermore, I think presenting the debate as solely concerned with who got to interpret Scripture in the abstract obscures the fact that the Church was using its interpretation of Scripture as a bludgeon to prevent scientific inquiry.  The actual question at stake was about who had the authority to make definitive pronouncements about astronomy, of which the debate about Scripture was, as I wrote, a key component.

To clarify: looking back at your original post, we fundamentally disagree about why Galileo got involved with Scriptural interpretation, and the answer to that question is critically relevant for determining whether he ~had the authority~ to intervene in Biblical disputation.  You’ve argued that Galileo took it on himself to challenge church authority by using heliocentrism to oppose scientific truth to the Bible.  This is simply untrue; the Church argued that heliocentrism was and must to be false because of Scripture, and as such tried to suppress Galileo’s efforts to submit proofs of heliocentrism.  Thus, to keep writing about astronomy without losing his head, Galileo had to argue that heliocentrism was commensurable with Scripture; he could not simply agree that proving heliocentrism would be heretical and keep on doing his research.

Galileo was caught in a double bind.  He could not continue his experiments and efforts to engage in scientific dialogue about Copernicanism if he did not prove that Copernicanism wasn’t contrary to Scripture; but he could not prove that Copernicanism wasn’t contrary to Scripture without attempting to interpret Scripture himself and thus violating the Church’s monopoly on hermeneutic authority.  You might fault him for not simply shutting up, assenting to Church authority, and stopping his efforts to prove Copernicanism, but in that case, yes, you’re going to have to admit that the claim in your original post that Galileo’s trial was “NOT (as anti-Catholics love to claim) to say ‘stop it with your science stuff, it threatens our Church’” is incorrect.

Below the cut, I’m going to demonstrate 1) that it was the Church and not Galileo who opposed heliocentrism to Scriptural truth and 2) that the Church therefore held that any effort to study the truth of heliocentrism was heretical, forcing Galileo to answer these objections if he wanted to keep doing science.  In doing so, I’ll be addressing an intrinsically-related concern by showing how your argument that the Church’s objection to Galileo was that he submitted insufficiently evidence-based science is misleading: the Church would have opposed any claim Galileo made for heliocentrism, no matter what evidence he produced, because they could not accept any scientific effort to prove heliocentrism was true, as Biblical evidence had to be interpreted literally and on its own, preempting any other kind of evidence.  Thus, when he argued on behalf of a new Scriptural hermeneutics, Galileo was not just asserting that he ~knew the Bible~ better than the Pope; he was arguing that Catholic theologians did not have the authority to foreclose debate by experts in fields like the natural sciences by making unilateral statements about Biblical interpretation solely on the basis of the literal text of the Bible.  Instead, when the Bible made reference to natural phenomena, interpreters should use the conclusions of the natural scientists as a guide to interpretation, instead of privileging textual literalism over scientific evidence.  So, to return to your original ask: I think the question of whether Galileo could assert the authority of expertise in certain scientific domains against the Church���s monopolistic authority over Scriptural interpretation pertaining to every topic is far from clear.

1. “The Church did not take issue with the heliocentric worldview - it took issue with Galileo saying that a heliocentric worldview was contrary to scripture. It was not.”

This was simply not true.  I don’t know how else to put this; Galileo did not say that a heliocentric worldview was contrary to Scripture; the Church did.

As I documented in the original post, Cardinal Bellarmine wrote to one of Galileo’s allies that “to affirm that the sun really is fixed in the center of the heavens and only revolves around itself (i. e., turns upon its axis ) without traveling from east to west, and that the earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves with great speed around the sun, is a very dangerous thing [that] injur[es] our holy faith and render[s] the Holy Scriptures false.”  He also added that “not only the Fathers but also the commentaries of modern writers on Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Josue … all agree in explaining literally (ad litteram) that the sun is in the heavens and moves swiftly around the earth, and that the earth is far from the heavens and stands immobile in the center of the universe.”

Similarly, in 1614, a Dominican preacher named Tommaso Caccini delivered a whole sermon on Joshua 10:13, in which he explicitly attacked Galileo and Copernicans as anti-Christian.

In fact, Galileo’s own defenses of the compatibility of Scripture and Galilean Copernicanism specifically emerged in response to one such attack; Galileo wrote the two letters in which he took such a position after hearing reports that, at a meeting in a Medici palazzo, “the Grand Duchess [had] pressed [his student] Castelli about the apparent contradiction between the Copernican claims and such biblical passages as the one in Joshua where the Lord commanded the Sun and Moon to stand still over the valley of Ajalon to allow the Israelites to wreak vengeance on their foes” (Ernan McMullin, “Galileo on science and Scripture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, ed. by Peter Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 277).  Galileo was forced into this conversation because the Church was making claims against heliocentrism.

2. “If Galileo had stuck to being a scientist and not taken it upon himself to interpret scripture, the Church would have embraced him and his work.” (and also, relatedly, “Pope Urban VIII … said that G could publish on the subject again, but only to discuss it as a theory, not a fact (remember, no one had proof of heliocentrism at the time)”)

In essence: the Church held that Galileo could not continue trying to prove that Copernicanism was a valid theory, because it was contrary to Scripture.  He was only allowed to continue discussing it as a false but useful system of calculations.  Thus, the Church would never have “embraced him and his work” as long as his work involved studying the heavens to try to determine whether heliocentrism was true.  They might have allowed him to continue discussing the mathematical implications of heliocentrism, but they never would have allowed the speculation and experiments he carried out to study whether heliocentrism might be true (although this is a complicated question because of the nature of his specific case - he was eventually personally singled out and prohibited from discussing Copernicanism at all).

A critical part of this turns on your distinction between Galileo discussing Copernicanism as a “theory, not a fact.”  You’ve presented this distinction as one we might be familiar with in modern science, with the problem with a mere theory being a lack of evidence; you wrote that the Church was annoyed that Galileo “stated that the heliocentric worldview was fact before he had proof,” which they thought was “highly irresponsible as a scientist,” and that the reason Copernicanism was only a theory was that it “no one had proof of heliocentrism.”  (Note: I know that in modern science, the theory/fact distinction is a bit more complicated - the terminology might more appropriately be the distinction between hypothesis and theory/law, as opposed to theory and fact - but I’m going to stick with your terms for now.)

In fact, the distinction they were drawing was different, although I can totally understand how easy it is to make this mistake.  This is going to get a bit technical historically, so to anyone reading this, please bear with me. using the system as a false but useful mathematical theory (as many scientists before Galileo had) and investigating the possibility that the system was actually a true description of the natural world.  The former was allowed: as long as Galileo admitted that Copernicanism was just helpful math that could never, ever be proved because it was false and anti-Scriptural, he was OK.  But if he tried to prove Copernicanism was true - if he investigated things like the effects of the moon on the waves or the directions of the trade winds or comets to try to see whether he could prove that the earth moved - he had stepped over the line.  He could never have provided a “proof” of heliocentrism that pleased the Church because they fundamentally objected to the possibility that heliocentrism was true.  You wrote that one of Church’s main problems with Galileo during his trial was that he had “broken the previous agreement to refrain from presenting heliocentrism as proven fact,” but in fact their problem was that he presented it as provable fact when their interpretation of Scripture foreclosed that possibility.  (Note: I discussed in my first post why Catholic orthodoxies about miracles also presented a stumbling block to the epistemological possibility of “proving” heliocentrism, but I’m going to refrain from recapping that argument and will simply focus on the Scripture piece below.)

In the officially-commissioned treatise that Melchior Inchofer wrote in response to Galileo’s Copernicanism, Inchofer asserted that “if it is a matter of faith that the earth is at rest, and if this has been adequately promulgated [which Inchofer had “proved” elsewhere in the treatise], then it is in no way allowable to argue for the contrary” (Richard J. Blackwell, Behind the Scenes at Galileo’s Trial: Including the First English Translation of Melchior Inchofer’s Tractatus Syllepticus (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 156).

Inchofer set up a dichotomy between using Copernicanism for the sake of mathematics, while accepting that it had to be false, and trying to prove the actual physical reality of Copernicanism.  He wrote that “in using Copernicus’s calculations, one can proceed in two ways.  The first is to use them as purely mathematical hypotheses, on which true physical principles are not thought to depend in any way.  The second is to use them as hypotheses which are taken to be the same in kind as true natural principles.”  The first use was acceptable; scientists should begin by acknowledging that the “entire Copernican system” was “false and contrary to reason,” but, after doing so, could use it as a basis for mathematical models, as “true calculations can still be deduced from it.”  However, the second use (treating Copernican principles as “hypotheses” and trying to figure out whether they were “true natural principles”) was forbidden, because one could NEVER attempt to prove that the system was true.  Scientists could “discuss its principles, but only to show that they are false, and that these calculations do not depend on true hypotheses” (Blackwell, Behind the Scenes, 157-8).  This was the case “because of the reasons stated at the beginning of this chapter” - that is, as he wrote at the beginning of the chapter/as I quote above, because it was simply “a matter of faith that the earth is at rest,” on the basis of authoritative Scriptural interpretation.  Again, Inchofer’s own summary of his text is simply devastatingly telling:

(Blackwell, Behind the Scenes, 109)

In the first eleven chapters, Inchofer, like so many Catholic theologians, demonstrated that Scripture simply proved that heliocentrism was false.  On this basis, he concluded that it was not “permissible to argue for the contrary.”  Authoritative Church Scriptural interpretation, which was based only on the literal language of the text, was a trump card; astronomers could not continue to ~stay in their lanes~ and just study the stars if Catholic orthodoxy disagreed with their conclusions.  The only way to open back up the debate Inchofer shuts down in chapter twelve is to dispute his conclusions in chapter one to eleven.

Similarly, as I discussed in the last post, like Inchofer, Cardinal Bellarmine argued that heliocentrism could never be proved because it contradicted Scripture.  Any attempt to submit such a proof - to pursue the question of whether heliocentrism as a “theory” could be right - would run counter to Scripture.  In short,

“None of [Bellarmine’s] arguments leave room for a concession on his part that a demonstration of the Earth’s motion might at a later time be discovered. Bellarmine is not merely pointing to the fact that the Copernicans have not yet come up with a proper demonstration of the Earth’s motion. He is, in his own mind, at least, giving reasons to believe that they never could.”

(source: McMullin, “Galileo on science and Scripture,” 283)

Thus, as Galileo wrote in his letter to the Grand Duchess, his fundamental problem was that many theologians

“pretend to the power of constraining others by scriptural authority to follow in a physical dispute that opinion which they think best agrees with the Bible, and then believe themselves not bound to answer the opposing reasons and experiences. In explanation and support of this opinion they say that since theology is queen of all the sciences, she need not bend in any way to accommodate herself to the teachings of less worthy sciences which are subordinate to her; these others must rather be referred to her as their supreme empress, changing and altering their conclusions according to her statutes and decrees. They add further that if in the inferior sciences any conclusion should be taken as certain in virtue of demonstrations or experiences, while in the Bible another conclusion is found repugnant to this, then the professors of that science should themselves undertake to undo their proofs and discover the fallacies in their own experiences, without bothering the theologians and exegetes.

Galileo therefore argued, as I explained in my first post, that the literal sense of the Bible, as propounded by Church theologians, shouldn’t be taken as an authoritative set of truth claims that could shut down debate in other fields.  This is why I stressed the fact that he wasn’t just arguing about usual issues of Biblical interpretation, he was challenging the hermeneutic principles being used to do the interpretation.  He wasn’t arguing that on their own turf, theologians had something wrong that he, as a lay person, could set right.  He was arguing that on his turf, theologians had no authority to claim that Scripture ought to be applied the way they saw it to matters of natural philosophy.  The problem was that, on the basis of their literal reading of the Bible, in which they interpreted every single word as the absolute and immediately obvious truth, theologians refused to admit that Galileo had any turf.  If the Bible said something like “the sun stood still … [it] stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day,” then the question of whether the sun moved was a matter for Biblical interpreters to discuss, not astronomers.  And these interpreters should only make reference to the obvious face value of the words, instead of looking to other fields - like astronomy - to see how Scripture might be interpreted in ways that accommodated scientific conclusions.

What’s critical to grasp here was that Galileo was making a distinction based on content: he wasn’t interested in fighting theologians for general control over the Bible, but was simply asserting that, in matters that could be investigated by referring to natural facts, natural conclusions had priority over textual literalism as a guiding principle for interpretation.  As he wrote in his letter to Castelli, “in disputes about natural phenomena, [Scripture] should be reserved to the last place,” and its interpreters should “strive to find the true meanings of scriptural passages agreeing with those physical conclusions of which we are already certain and sure,” instead of “oblig[ing] scriptural passages to have to maintain the truth of any physical conclusions whose contrary could ever be proved to us by the senses and demonstrative and necessary reasons.”  He was defending himself and the authority of other astronomers against people like Inchofer, Bellarmine, and the Pope, who argued that their authority was multi-disciplinary and always took priority over experts in other disciplines.

In essence, as David Wootton writes, Galileo was disagreeing with the claim that

because theology was the queen of the sciences, it was perfectly proper for theologians to settle disputes between astronomers. Here Galileo argued that one had to distinguish between the subject matter of a body of knowledge and the expertise of those who studied it. The subject matter of theology, which concerned itself with the salvation of souls, was certainly superior to the subject matter of astronomy, but this did not make theologians expert in astronomy. In arguing in favour of technical expertise, … [and] that there were some choices that were properly the preserve of experts, Galileo was defending a new type of authority.

(source: David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), Chapter 22 (again, sorry, my edition doesn’t have page numbers for this bit!))

To recap:

The Church argued that its authoritative interpretation of Scripture, based solely on literal interpretations of the letter of the text, disproved the possibility that heliocentrism was true.

Galileo was therefore prohibited from treating Copernicanism as an actual possible hypothesis that he could gather evidence for, instead of a useful shortcut for calculations.

Galileo’s choices were either to accept that the Church’s position on Scripture was right and heliocentrism was heretical and false, and therefore to stop studying whether heliocentrism was true; or to argue that the Church should not use its literal interpretation of Scripture to suppress conversations among experts who studied nature.

Galileo therefore argued that when Scripture made reference to natural phenomena, theologians did not have the final authority to interpret Scripture alone, solely making reference to the literal language of the text and ignoring any natural evidence, and should instead use the evidence of nature, as studied by scientific experts, as part of their hermeneutic principles.

So - do we actually agree that Galileo didn’t “have that authority,” as you wrote in your ask?  On the one hand, he was de facto challenging a competence the Church had historically reserved to itself: the authority to interpret all Bible passages.  But, in another light, the authority he was claiming was the authority of expertise discussed by Wootton - the authority to carry out scientific studies without the Church citing the language of Scripture to shut down all inquiry.  Did he have that authority?  It’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure we’d reach the same conclusion about it - you’ll have to get back to me on that one.  Furthermore, phrasing the question solely as one of Scriptural interpretation obscures a key component of the debate, which, again, is the claim that the Church wasn’t objecting to Galileo’s doing science.  They were objecting to any attempt to determine whether heliocentrism could stand up as a theory, because they held that their authority to interpret the Bible literally superseded any claims made from any other body of evidence using any other set of principles.

As a side note, the links to sources you’ve added in your follow-up post don’t really support your conclusions.  You’re right that some of them support my conclusions, but only inasmuch as we disagree.  Your last link, to Blackwell’s account of Galileo’s trial, is actually what I already had cited for the Melchior Inchofer treatise, which demonstrates exactly my point: that the Church was using its authority over Scripture in tandem with the claim that the literal interpretation of Scripture held for every domain to preclude scientific study.  Indeed, even in the selection you’ve linked, Blackwell dutifully concludes that “the issue at hand was whether Copernican astronomy contradicted certain relevant passages in Scripture that speak in terms of an earth-centered universe. If so, it was thought that Copernicanism must be false” (Blackwell, Behind the Scenes, 3-4).  He even includes a quick discussion of what it meant to hold Copernicanism “suppositionally” on p.8-9, explaining, just as I discussed above, that the Church only allowed scientists to discuss Copernicanism as a useful but inherently false and anti-Scriptural means of calculation that one could and should never attempt to “prove” - although the brevity of this discussion might have been a bit confusing/led you to describe as a problem of fact vs. theory, instead of theory-one-should-never-discuss vs. theory-one-could-try-to-prove?  In any event, the Copernicus pieces you linked aren’t that relevant to this discussion, having been published almost a century prior and lacking any context; I provided an overview of contemporary views of Copernicus in the seventeenth century in my previous post.

FWIW, if you’re honestly interested in this topic, you should look at the Ernan McMullin article I’ve cited several times, which lays out some of the key points of the debate over Biblical hermeneutics, showing how it was a debate over interpretive principles in which Galileo had to intervene in order to keep doing science.  The article was published in the Cambridge University Press companion to Galileo, which is a standard and respected reference in the field, and McMullin was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, an authority on Galileo, and an ordained Catholic priest who served at points as the president of the American Philosophical Association, the Philosophy of Science Association, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association.  If you don’t have access to it (academia paywalls are #theworst), I���d be happy to send it your way.