User:ZanderSchubert/Essay Backup
Hello! This is just a paranoia stopper, incase I lose my real important essay. If someone wants to use the essay to help correct the article on the Letter to Grand Duchess Christina, they can, but some glossing over might've occured, so be wary. I do, however, have the complete original text on... wait, why am I justifying this page to you? It's my space and I'll cry if I want to. Or something like that.
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
Galileo Galilei has been noted as one of the major thinkers of the renaissance and one of the important mathematicians who “rang the death knell for the Ptolemaic universe”1 by given evidence that the universe wasn't geocentric. At the time, this was controversial because of their contradiction to the Catholic Church's beliefs, prompting Galileo to explain himself to his critics, and he did so with a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany in 1615. This essay will attempt to explain what Galileo said about his discoveries and their criticisms in the letter, the relevance of the letter to history, and the views during the early seventeenth century which made his discoveries so controversial.
Until Nicolaus Copernicus published his treatise On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the Ptolemaic system, that the Earth was the centre of the universe, was considered true and accurate. Because until the renaissance religion and science were often considered one and the same, the belief that the Earth was the centre became part of the Catholic Church's canon. §§§§§However, Galileo's The Starry Messenger did something worse which made the Church stand up and give him hell about it§§§§§
According to Galileo, the sections from the Bible which were being used to refute the claims that his discoveries, that the universe isn't centred on the earth but on the sun, were taken too literally. For example, one biblical passage commonly used against him was Psalm 104:2, which said that God “stretchest out the heavens like a curtain”. If the heavens were spherical, they argued, they cannot be spherical and changing like in Galileo's theory. Galileo does counter these specific examples by using the words of others, especially St Augustine, whose Literal Meaning of Genesis, mentioned in the letter by its Latin name De Genesi ad literam, is quoted continually. Using both St Augustine's words and his own, he says that the sections are either using poetic language, which shouldn't be used as a guide for intimate science, using terms in a non-literal way, such as tesing the exact definition of curtain in Psalm 104:2, or written in such a way that, in Galileo's words, they “avoid confusion in the minds of the common people which would render them contumacious [asserting authority] towards higher mysteries”2.
Like people of his time, Galileo and his discoveries were not against the Church, as shown in this letter's efforts to refute its supposed anti-biblical stance suing the Bible as proof, merely against the ideas held by the Catholic church at the time. the Church wasn't against the Bible, per se, but they misinterpreted it, at least in the view of Galileo. As mentioned above, the belief that the Earth is the centre of the universe wasn't given in the Bible, but because they held the belief that a geocentric universe is the only one that could exist, they found part of the Bible which appear to say that it did. While Galileo does address some of these passages specifically, he says generally the Bible hasn't describe the universe intricately, saying that Venus is mentioned once or twice under the name of Lucifer and the rest of the planets are ignored3, and that it couldn't, and shouldn't, describe how the universe actually works, succinctly put in the phrase “the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one gets to heaven, not how heaven goes.”4 He even states that if his works are banned, then all astronomy should be banned as well, and even “forbid men to look at the heavens, in order they might not see ... observations which can never be reconciled with the Ptolemaic system in any way” (pp. 195-196), as a point that his theories, having been discovered, could not be easily refuted.
Unlike people during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, science wasn't, or at least wasn't trying to, contradict the Church or go against the Bible, and, as through examples in Galileo's letter, still considered the Bible the ultimate truth: a twentieth century scientist in a similar position would probably ignore the Bible as he or she would not worry on whether it contradicts the Bible or is against the Church's beliefs, and would take very little effort, if any, to make sure that the discoveries were still in accordance with the Church. Galileo's continual efforts to prove his theories aren't against the Bible not only shows how religious the seventeenth century and the renaissance were in comparison to the present day, but also that the Bible was still considered to be the bedrock of all truth and that science that disputed it was not only false but heretical.
In conclusion, the letter shows that the power of faith and the Catholic Church during the time when vast scientific discoveries were hatched was so powerful that they had to follow the laws of the Bible and the Church, and because Galileo's The Starry Messenger appeared against such laws, he had to write and specifically refute each claim of heresy in order to be considered truthful and Christian.
Bibliography
Galilei, Galileo, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina”, 1615, in “Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo” translated by Stillman Drake, New York: Anchor Books, 1990.
Bently, Jerry H. and Ziegler, Herbert F., “Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past”, 3rd edition, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
The King James Version of the Holy Bible.
Footnotes
1: Bently and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, Vol. II, (New York: McGraw-Hill) p. 657.
2: Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, p. 182.
3: Ibid, p. 184.
4: Cardinal Baronius, as quoted in Galileo, p.186