Thread by @TimONeill007

The idea that the "real" cause of the 1633 trial of Galileo was that "he was a huge dick to the Pope" is not the most egregious myth about the Galileo Affair, but it's still essentially wrong. The frustrating thing is that it's almost right and is often argued as a counter ...

https://twitter.com/aelfred_D/status/1860869467082781143

... to other, more common and more erroneous myths. But it's wrong.

The claim is that the Church didn't really care about the scientific debate (true, up to a point) and were happy to leave Galileo to speculate along with other astronomers (also true, up to a point), but ...

... the real problem was Galileo put Pope Urban's arguments in the mouth of the character of Simplicio in his *Dialogue*. This could be interpreted as meaning "the simpleton/fool" and so the pope got angry and hauled Galileo before the Inquisition to punish him.

This is a ...

... neat story and it gives those who are more favourably disposed to the Catholic Church a way of deflecting the "they hated science and so persecuted a scientist" myth. But it isn't accurate.

The background here is that in 1624 the newly elected Urban VIII showed great ...

... favour to Galileo, granting him a number of private audiences. In this period Urban gave Galileo a commission to write a book examining the competing cosmological models available at the time, showing that the Church understood the science and that the 1616 ruling that ...

... heliocentrism was not proven and so could not be taught as fact was based on a clear understanding of the debate, not (as some Protestants claimed) on ignorance. Urban insisted that Galileo did not come donw on the side of any particular model and that he include the ...

... pope's own highly instrumentalist arguments in the book's conclusion.

Urban believed that all the competing models were merely functional and none could be proven. So they were potentially useful as calculating devices, but none could ever been shown to be true. In ...

... addition to this instrumentalist position, he held the theological view that even attempting to prove any given model was wrong, because doing so attempted to limit the omnipotence of God. God could have created the cosmos any way he liked, so to try to pin down how he ...

... had done so was not only scientifically impossible, but theologically misguided.

Galileo, obviously, disagreed on both points. But he saw this book as his great opportunity to push his favourted model, Copernicanism, under the cloak of seeming neutrality, and all with ...

... advantage of a Papal imprimatur. So he spent the next eight years writing his book, wrangling with the Master of the Sacred Palace, Niccolo Riccardi, over what he could and couldn't include in it and - eventually - pulling some shifty moves to get it past the Church ...

... censors and hide the fact that he had not stuck to his agreement with the pope at all.

Not only does the book clearly argue strongly for Copernicanism and put the Ptolmaic system in the worst possible light (while ignoring the Tychonian and Keplerian systems completely), ...

... but Galileo also ends it with his Argument from the Tides - a flawed and wrong attempt at proving the rotation of the earth that Riccardi had explicitly told him to leave out of the book.

So the book was clearly arguing for heliocentrism and was not the neutral survey ...

... the pope had commissioned. Worse, it appeared at a point where Pope Urban was caught between France and Spain in the power struggles of the Thirty Years War and was under attack by the Spanish cardinals over being too lax about heresy. And, in this context, one of Urban's ...

... court favourites publishes a book clearly arguing for a position that the Inquisition had declared "formally heretical". Urban was furious.

Correspondence from 1632 shows he ordered the Roman Inquisition to investigate Galileo. They didn't take long to find something ...

... they could use against him - the 1616 injunction imposed on Galileo by Chief Inquisitor Roberto Bellarmine ordering him not to "hold, teach or defend [Copernicanism] in any way whatever, orally or in writing". Galileo had conveniently forgotten to mention this to Pope ...

... Urban or to Niccolo Riccardi in all their dealings over the previous eight years. If Urban was angry before, he was doubly so now. So when Galileo went to trial on the charge of "vehement suspicion of heresy" (no, not heresy per se) in 1633, his disobeying this injunction ...

... was the centrepiece of the case and the reason he was found guilty.

We have extensive documentation of all this and it is absolutely clear that THIS was the background to the case. Nowhere in any of these sources is anything mentioned about the character "Simplicio" in

... the *Dialogue* or anything at all about the pope being offended his arguments were put in that character's mouth. And we do have evidence of Urban's sensitivity to mockery. A letter from 1632 mentions a rumour that the appearance of an image of three dolphins, each with ...

... its tail in the mouth of another, on the books' frontispiece was queried as a possible satirical reference to charges regarding Urban's nepotism. In fact, it was just the publisher's logo.

So Urban was senstive and a bit paranoid, yet we have no hint of this "Simplicio" ...

... before or during the trial. It simply isn't mentioned. This would be exceedingly strange if, as the story goes, it was the "REAL" reason for the trial.

The "Simplicio" story doesn't appear until *after* trial - it is first mentioned in a letter by Benedetto Castelli to ...

... Galileo in 1635 - two years later - as a rumour going around, with no indication that this had been a real issue before the trial. This rumour then appears in various accounts of the trial in the century after. This repetition meant it slowly became part of the Galileo ...

... mythology and the idea it was the "real reason" for Galileo's persecution took hold.

But it seems to have been simply a rumour that arose later, NOT a genuine issue at the time. Leading Galileo scholar, Maurice A. Finocchario dismisses it as a legitimate element in the ...

... Galileo Affair in several of his books, including his *Retrying Galileo: 1633-1992* (2005 ) p. 62 (below).

So it has been repeated for 389 years because it's a cute, neat, simple story. But it's crap. Please stop repeating it.

@aelfred_D … contrast, we have plenty of attenuation as to what *actually* angered Urban. So you should stop stating this weak later rumour was the real reason for the whole businesses as though that’s fact. It isn’t.

@aelfred_D *plenty of attestation

@aelfred_D ... parsimonious explantion is that it didn't arise as an issue in 1632-33 and was only a bit of later gossip.
The very best you could argue is that it was a minor element in 1632-33 but not important enough to be mentioned and only gets noted later. But that's as good an ...

@aelfred_D ... argument as anyone could make. The things that *were* mentioned before and during the trial were clearly the main, actual issues. So at best you can tack on the Simplicio idea as a *possible* minor element. You simply can't do anything more than that.

@camwg86 ... years ago. So "a long time"?