observation and reasoning on the one hand, and of the authority of the Church and the Bible on the other, a controversy which began to take shape about this time and which, though its battle-field has shifted from science to science, has lasted almost without interruption till modern times.
In 1611 was published a tract maintaining Jupiter's satellites to be unscriptural. In 1612 Galilei consulted Cardinal Conti as to the astronomical teaching of the Bible, and obtained from him the opinion that the Bible appeared to discountenance both the Aristotelian doctrine of the immutability of the heavens and the Coppernican doctrine of the motion of the earth. A tract of Galilei's on floating bodies, published in 1612, roused fresh opposition, but on the other hand Cardinal Barberini (who afterwards, as Urban VIII., took a leading part in his persecution), specially thanked him for a presentation copy of the book on sun-spots, in which Galilei, for the first time, clearly proclaimed in public his adherence to the Coppernican system. In the same year (1613) his friend and follower, Father Castelli, was appointed professor of mathematics at Pisa, with special instructions not to lecture on the motion of the earth. Within a few months Castelli was drawn into a discussion on the relations of the Bible to astronomy, at the house of the Grand Duchess, and quoted Galilei in support of his views; this caused Galilei to express his opinions at some length in a letter to Castelli, which was circulated in manuscript at the court. To this a Dominican preacher, Caccini, replied a few months afterwards by a violent sermon on the text, "Ye Galileans, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?"[1] and in 1615 Galilei was secretly denounced to the Inquisition on the strength of the letter to Castelli and other evidence. In the same year he expanded the letter to Castelli into a more elaborate treatise, in the form of a Letter to the Grand Duchess Christine, which was circulated in manuscript, but not printed till 1636. The discussion of the bearing of particular passages of the Bible (e.g. the account of the miracle of Joshua) on the Ptolemaic and Coppernican
- ↑ Acts i. ii. The pun is not quite so bad in its Latin form: Viri Galilaei, etc.
