Rethinking
Bruno and the Inquisition Rethinking
Bruno and the Inquisition|
DAN FALK Four hundred years ago, a group known as the Company of Mercy and Pity arrived at the Nona Tower in Rome to take charge of a prisoner. They escorted him to the Square of Flowers, where he was stripped and tied to a stake. Jesuit and Dominican priests urged the prisoner to recant his heretical views. As his jaw was held shut by an iron clamp, this proved impossible. In any event, Giordano Bruno had no wish to recant. To the end, the Italian scientist-monk stood by his beliefs-including the radical notion that Earth moved around the sun. In the eyes of the Inquisition, it was an unpardonable heresy. Bruno was burned at the stake. His execution, on Feb. 19, 1600, marks one of the darkest days in the history of science. That and the more famous trial and imprisonment of Galileo which came just a few decades later continue to stand as powerful symbols of the conflict between science and religion. Times, of course, have changed. In 1992, the Vatican admitted it was wrong to have condemned Galileo. And earlier this month, Rome moved to partially rehabilitate Bruno, saying that although his views were heretical, he should not have been executed. More contrition is on the way: According to the Guardian newspaper, the Vatican next month will issue "a sweeping apology for 2,000 years of violence, persecution and blunders." Yet what happened to bruno and Galileo is much more than a story of science-versus-religion. The events that led to their downfalls are still seen in black-and-white terms-an oversimplification of Historical events. Take Bruno's execution: Many people assume he was put to death simply for supporting the Copernican world-view, in which the sun, rather than Earth, was central. But that was only a small part of the drama, says Owen Gingerich, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. |
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"Giordano Bruno's execution was a very complicated story," he says. "He had all kinds of theological excesses, in the view of his inquisitors. The fact that he happened to accept the Copernican system became part of the issue, but it was not an essential part." More damning was Bruno's belief in an infinite universe. God, he wrote, "is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single Earth, but in a thousand, I say, in an infinity of worlds." He further speculated that these worlds might be inhabited. "This plurality of intelligent life in the universe was seen as a considerable threat to the Catholic theological structure," Dr. Gingerich says. Giordano bruno was born in Italy in 1548. Described as a mystic, philosopher, astrologer and poet, he joined the Dominican order in 1563. Soon, however, he became skeptical of church dogma. Fearing persecution, he fled Italy in 1577. But he later returned and, as philosopher Simon Blackburn of the University of North Carolina put it, "unwisely placed himself within reach of the Inquisition." He was arrested in Venice in 1593. The Galileo story is an even murkier mix of philosophy, theology, and politics. In 1609, Galileo turned the newly invented telescope to the night sky. Within months, he discovered four moons revolving about Jupiter and observed Venus going through moon-like phases, suggesting the planet orbited the sun. Both of these discoveries contradicted the Earth-centred view of the solar system endorsed by the church. Galileo also saw dark spots on the sun, as well as mountains and craters on the moon-which contradicted the accepted view of the sun and the moon as "perfect" bodies. The discoveries were alarming enough- but it was how Galileo expressed his views, combined with the politics of power in Rome that led to his arrest, Dr. Gingerich says. Galileo chose to write in Italian instead of Latin, making his work accessible. His most troublesome book, A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, mocked the church. Pope Urban VIII, at one time a friend and supporter of Galileo, was not amused. "The Galileo affair is heavily fraught with particular personalities that were playing out the battle, rather than lofty issues of whether humankind was at the centre of the cosmos or not," Dr. Gingerich says. At a time when Protestantism was challenging Catholic beliefs in Europe's northern countries, the last thing the Vatican needed was an ideological challenge on its home turf. Galileo "was sentenced rather severely for disobeying orders, for rocking the boat when Rome was trying to have a unified view, theologically, against the Protestants," Dr. Gingerich says. "And they didn't want an amateur theologian messing around with this." Though he was spared Bruno's fate, Galileo was forced to recant his support for Copernicus and spend the final eight years of his life under house arrest in his villa near Florence. And what of Copernicus? Dr. Gingerich has spent several decades studying 16'th century copies of Copernicus's writings . particularly his ground breaking. Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the revolution of the Heavenly Bodies). The Italian copies were all censored, while those in France and Spain were not. "Apparently this was being seen as a local Italian imbroglio," Dr. Ginghrich says. Ultimately, these 16'th and 17'th century battles were "a powerful Conflict about who had direct access to truth." Although bruno and Galileo are remembered for clashing with the church, the story of science and religion in the 16'th and 17'th centuries is not solely one of conflict. Astronomical observations, for example, were crucial for determining the date of Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar. "I think one of the things that the scholars have started to show is that the story has always been a lot more complex than simply just opposition between science and religion," says Michael Ruse, a philosopher at the University of Guelph, Ont. "We know, for instance that the medieval church, far from being science hostile, was very science sympathetic. And a great deal of science was done in the monasteries, under the banner of the Catholic church." · · Dan Falk is a science journalist based in Toronto. |
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