Burned Alive : Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition. PDF
Preview Burned Alive : Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition.
BURNED ALIVE a lberto a. m a rtín ez B U R N E D A L I V E g i o r d a n o b r u n o , g a l i l e o and i n q u i s i t i o n the reaktion books Published by reaktion books ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2018 Copyright © Alberto A. Martínez 2018 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 896 8 CONTENTS Introduction 7 1 The Crimes of Giordano Bruno 14 Pythagoras and Copernicus 17 The Moving Earth and the | Fugitive Friar 28 Prisoner of the Inquisition 37 Censured | | Propositions in Bruno’s Books 47 Fire and Smoke 70 Why | | the Romans Killed Bruno 77 2 Aliens on the Moon? 100 Kepler Announces Life in Other Worlds! 103 Campanella | Imprisoned and Tortured 115 Bellarmine and the Enemies | of Bruno 123 Galileo in Danger 137 | 3 The Enemies of Galileo 161 Campanella Defends Galileo from Prison 171 Galileo Defends | the Pythagorean Doctrines Again 179 Inchofer Against the | New Pythagoreans 203 No Life in Other Worlds, No Living | Earth 211 Campanella’s Exile and Death 232 | 4 Worlds on the Moon and the Stars 238 How Heretical, Really? 239 Bellarmine’s Innumerable Suns 247 | Critiques after Galileo’s Death 251 Conclusion 264 | references 281 acknowledgements 329 photo acknowledgements 333 index 335 Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up at the sky? Acts 1:11 I have indeed asserted infinite particular worlds similar to the Earth, which with Pythagoras I consider a star, similar to which is the Moon, other planets and other stars, which are infinitely many. Giordano Bruno to the Inquisition in Venice, 1592 INTRODUCTION M ost people know about Galileo. They know that he said the Earth moves around the Sun. And they know that he got in trouble with the Catholic Church for doing so. The Roman Catholic Inquisition condemned old Galileo to surrender his freedom for the rest of his life. Nowadays he is admired as a hero in the history of science. Fewer people know about Giordano Bruno. Years before Galileo, Bruno too was put on trial by the Inquisitors. They imprisoned him for almost eight years. Then they finally condemned him to what was feared as the worst kind of punishment: the jailors gagged him, tied him to a post in a public place in Rome, and set the pyre on fire to broil and burn him alive. Historians say that Giordano Bruno was not condemned for his beliefs about astronomy or cosmology – unlike Galileo. Still, Bruno is increasingly famous. He was featured in the remake of the popular tv series Cosmos. Its first episode, which dedicated much of its airtime to Giordano Bruno, aired in 2014 and was watched by roughly seven million people in the u.s. The narrator, the astro physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, said that Bruno risked his life by voicing his vision of the cosmos: ‘the penalty for doing so, in his world, was the most vicious form of cruel and unusual punishment.’ Soon, many commentators complained that Cosmos had misrepre sented Bruno by echoing the myth that the Inquisition killed him for his cosmological views. This book shows, despite all expectations, that Giordano Bruno really was burned alive for his beliefs about the universe. Bruno 7 burned alive argued that the Earth has a soul and that many worlds exist. However, historians didn’t know that those beliefs were con sidered heresies, that is, crimes against God, punishable by death. By inspect ing books on heresies and Catholic law, I found that these beliefs were heretical long before Bruno advocated them. Bruno didn’t know this, and neither did later science writers. Furthermore, this book will show that these same censured beliefs were involved in the Catholic opposition to Galileo. For over a hundred years, people have wondered whether the infamous trial of Galileo was connected to the Inquisition’s previous trial against Bruno. This book will show that these trials were indeed linked. Some of Galileo’s critics were annoyed that he seemed to support Bruno’s ‘horrendous’ beliefs: that many worlds exist and that the Earth moves because it has a soul. Christians denounced such beliefs as ‘Pythagorean’. In ancient times Pythagoras was allegedly the Greek author of the theory that Earth is one of the stars and that it moves. But historians didn’t know that for a thousand years prominent Christians demonized Pythagoras and his disciples as deceptive sinners and false imitators of Jesus Christ. This book will illuminate the Copernican Revolution in that neglected context. Surprisingly, Bruno’s condemnation was caused mainly by his obstinate defence of such beliefs: the existence of many worlds and the soul of the world. Most importantly, this book reveals an unpublished Latin manuscript in which Galileo’s most critical judge, the author of the most negative reports used by the Inquisition against him, censured Galileo and the Copernicans for those same beliefs. The Inquisition condemned the Copernicans as a heretical ‘sect’ of New Pythagoreans. This story is about the roots of the notorious conflict between science and Christianity. Actually, the two have not often opposed one another.1 In fact, Christianity has often sponsored and sup ported the sciences. But we still struggle to understand what exactly happened between Bruno, Galileo and the Church. There is another reason, too, why this story needs to be told: the Roman Inquisition won. Not only did it succeed in killing Bruno and silencing Galileo, it also succeeded in preventing people from knowing Bruno’s beliefs. To this day, more than four hundred years after Bruno died, most scientists and teachers are unaware that Giordano Bruno’s account of the universe was far more correct than 8 Introduction the beliefs of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. To this day, scientists don’t know that Bruno belongs among those famous men. This is because the Inquisition banned and burned Bruno’s books. The clergymen of the Index of Forbidden Books prohibited all Catholics from reading, quoting, discussing or even mention ing any of Bruno’s beliefs. They were forbidden from even writing Bruno’s name. He was a heretic, and Catholics should not write about heretics. Thus they buried his role in the history of astronomy and cosmology. But here’s what really happened. Like Copernicus, Bruno too believed and argued that the Earth really does move, at a time when hardly anyone else asserted this, and long before Galileo and Kepler. Yet Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo wrongly claimed that the Sun and the stars do not move. But Bruno rightly said that they move. In 1613 Galileo realized that the Sun spins on its axis, yet did not realize that it also really moves through space, as Bruno expected. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo believed that the Sun is the centre of the entire universe. But here too they were wrong. Instead, Bruno rightly insisted that the Sun is not the centre, not at all. He alone rightly explained that our universe has no centre. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo also believed that the stars were all arranged in a spherical heaven, but that was another big mistake. Instead, Bruno thoughtfully argued that the stars are distributed homogeneously throughout a boundless, infinite space. And Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo thought that the Sun is not a star. To the contrary, Bruno rightly insisted that the Sun is a star, all the stars are suns, and many of them are larger than our Sun. He first published these claims in 1584. Only five decades later, in 1633, did Galileo briefly suggest that the stars are suns – in just one phrase in the fictitious voice of one character in his Dialogue of the Two Chief Systems of the World. Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler mistakenly said that the orbits and motions of the planets were circular. But in 1584 Bruno rightly denied it, insisting that no heavenly motions are really circular. Only 35 years later did Kepler realize and prove that the orbits of planets are not really circular. Galileo apparently never agreed with Bruno’s or Kepler’s claims that the orbits were not circular. He mistakenly argued that all natural motions are circular. 9
The list of books you might like
