St Robert Bellarmine is perhaps best known for his dealings with Galileo Galilei, whom he warned off teaching the Copernican ideas that would later underpin astronomy. However, a closer look at the interaction between the theologian and the scientist suggests that there was more to the Galileo Affair than meets the eye.
A True Demonstration: Bellarmine and the Stars as Evidence Against Earth’s Motion in the Early Seventeenth Century
Article (PDF) 17 pages Level: high school and above This 2011 article from Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture presents the following argument: In 1615 Robert Cardinal Bellarmine demanded a “true demonstration” of Earth’s motion before he would cease to doubt the Copernican world system. No such demonstration was available because the geocentric Tychonic world system was a viable alternative to the heliocentric Copernican system. On the contrary, recent work concerning early observations of stars suggests that, thanks to astronomers’ misunderstanding of the images of stars seen through the telescope, the only “true demonstration” the telescope provided in Bellarmine’s day showed the earth not to circle the Sun. This had been discussed by the German astronomer Simon Marius, in his Mundus Iovialis, just prior to Bellarmine’s request for a “true demonstration.” Click here to download “A True Demonstration: Bellarmine and the Stars as Evidence Against Earth’s Motion in the Early Seventeenth Century” directly from Logos. Click here to download … Continue reading →
Bellarmine – The Louvain Lectures
Louvain lectures of Bellarmine and the autograph copy of his 1616 declaration to Galileo. Texts in the original Latin and Italian with English translation. Introduction, commentary, and notes.
Continue reading →Bellarmine in Perspective
An oft-quoted quip suggests Bellarmine was a better scientist than Galileo, while Galileos letter to the Grand Duchess showed him to be a better theologian than Bellarmine. As serious analysis, the quip falls short of the mark. The real problem with both parties is that our modern idea of what science is and how it proceeds was only just being born at this time.
Continue reading →Decree of Approval for the work “Elements of Astronomy” by Giuseppe Settele, in support of the heliocentric system (1820)
Article 300 words Level: all audiences The 1820 decree under Pope Pius VII removing all remaining prohibitions against the Copernican system. This arose from the request of Fr. Giuseppe Settele for an imprimatur on his book Elementi di ottica e di astronomia (Elements of Optics and Astronomy), which referenced Earth’s motion. The request was denied; Settele appealed to the Pope. This translation is from the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti. The translation is from the original Latin provided in W. Brandmüller and E.J. Greipl, eds., Copernico, Galilei e la chiesa : fine della controversia (1820) : gli atti del Sant’Uffizio {i.e. Copernicus, Galileo, and the Church: The End of the Controversy (1820), Acts of the Holy Office} (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1992), pp. 300-301. [Rome], 1820 VIII 16 Vol. I, fol. 174v (Bruni, scribe) The Assessor of the Holy Office has referred the … Continue reading →
Discovery in the New Cosmology of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo
Article (PDF) 14 pages, 6100 words Level: university This article for the Paths of Discovery (published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) by Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, suggests “three components contained in the notion of discovery: newness, an opening to the future and, in the case of astronomical discovery, a blending of theory and observation. Discovery means that something new comes to light and this generally happens suddenly and unexpectedly.” Click here for a link to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ entire Paths of Discovery volume. [Click here to download PDF]
Continue reading →Galileo – History, Science and Faith
Video One hour Level: all audiences Fr. Christopher Corbally, S. J., a research astronomer at the Vatican Observatory since 1983, provides a short history of Galileo, his science, and his interactions with the Church.
Continue reading →Galileo and Bellarmine
In order to appreciate the marvel and the true significance of Galileo’s observations we must appreciate the historical precedents which will have important repercussions on the intellectual climate in Europe at the time of Galileo and, therefore, on the critical intellectual period through which Galileo himself was passing at the time those observations were made.
Continue reading →Galileo and His Times
A critical reading of the results from the 1992 Papal commission on Galileo
Continue reading →Galileo’s Telescopic Observations: The Marvel and Meaning of Discovery
Link to an article published for the IAU Symposium. Galileo’s Medicean Moons: Their Impact on 400 Years of Discovery. For the first time in over 2,000 years new significant observational data had been put at the disposition of anyone who cared to think, not in abstract preconceptions but in obedience to what the universe had to say about itself.
Continue reading →Galileo’s Newly-Discovered Letter
Article (blog post) 2800 words Level: high school and above In 2018 the journal Nature announced that a previously-unknown copy of one of Galileo’s letters had been discovered in the archives of the Royal Society—and Nature stated that the new copy showed Galileo to have lied. Christopher Graney discusses this letter (which was arguably the event that set the “Galileo Affair” into motion) in a posting on the Vatican Observatory’s blog, The Catholic Astronomer, and also discusses the Nature announcement, the science of Galileo’s time, and the people involved with the letter. Click here to read the entire blog posting from The Catholic Astronomer.
Continue reading →How Frs. Riccioli and Dechales Argued that Science Shows the Earth to be at Rest – The Coriolis Effect
Article (blog post) 600 words Level: all audiences In this post on The Catholic Astronomer blog, Christopher Graney discusses how the effect of Earth’s rotation on objects travelling through the air (now known as the “Coriolis effect”) was foreseen by Jesuit scientists, who argued that the absence of this effect indicated that Copernicus was wrong about the Earth being in motion. This scientific argument against the Earth’s motion turned out to be wrong because the effect did in fact exist, but was very hard to detect. Click here to read the full article on The Catholic Astronomer – the blog of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.
Continue reading →Mathematical Disquisitions – The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo
Book 176 pages Level: high school and above This 2017 book by Christopher M. Graney is the first complete English translation of an astronomical text written by scientists who stood opposite Galileo in the debate on the question of Earth’s motion. Galileo painted a very unfavorable portrait of Mathematical Disquisitions and its Jesuit authors, but the book itself turns out to be a competent scientific work and not much like Galileo’s portrayal of it. From the publisher, the University of Notre Dame Press: Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo offers a new English translation of the 1614 Disquisitiones Mathematicae, which Johann Georg Locher wrote under the guidance of the German Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner. The booklet, an anti-Copernican astronomical work, is of interest in large part because Galileo Galilei, who came into conflict with Scheiner over the discovery of sunspots, devoted numerous pages within his famous 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican to ridiculing Disquisitiones. The brief text (the … Continue reading →
Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
Article 1000 words Level: all audiences This article by Christopher Graney was originally published by Aeon, and later republished by The Atlantic and others. It discusses astronomical work published in 1614 by Johann Georg Locher, a student of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner. There is a great contrast between how Galileo portrayed Locher’s work, and the work itself. Graney writes, “Locher matters. Science’s history matters. Anti-Copernicans such as Locher and Brahe show that science has always functioned as a contest of ideas, and that science was present in both sides of the vigorous debate over Earth’s motion.” Click here for this article from Aeon. Click here for this article from The Atlantic.
Continue reading →Science Meets Biblical Exegesis in the Galileo Affair
Could the Galileo affair, interpreted with historical accuracy, provide an opportunity to come to understand the relationship of contemporary scientific culture and inherited religious culture?
Continue reading →The Church and Galileo, by Ernan McMullin
Book 408 pages Level: university A book edited by Fr. Ernan McMullin in 2005. From the web site of the publisher, the University of Notre Dame Press: This collection of first-rate essays aims to provide an accurate scholarly assessment of the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and Galileo. In 1981, Pope John Paul II established a commission to inquire into the Church’s treatment of Galileo “in loyal recognition of wrongs, from whatever side they came,” hoping this way to “dispel the mistrust . . . between science and faith.” When the Galileo Commission finally issued its report in 1992, many scholars were disappointed by its inadequacies and its perpetuation of old defensive stratagems. This volume attempts what the Commission failed to provide—a historically accurate, scholarly, and balanced account of Galileo and his difficult relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Contributors provide careful analyses of the interactions of the Church and Galileo over the thirty years between 1612 and his … Continue reading →
The Church’s Most Recent Attempt to Dispel the Galileo Myth
This paper investigates the tensions within the Society of Jesus, especially at the Roman College, at the time of Galileo and how they were resolved or not in a spirit of accommodation which was maturing at that time and which has entered into the Jesuit bloodstream.
Continue reading →The Galileo Affair: Context and Controversy
Video 1 hour 20 minutes (includes 15 minutes Q&A) Level: all audiences Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., an astronomer with the Vatican Observatory, delivered “The Galileo Affair: Context and Controversy” in the University at Albany Lecture Center. on November 19, 2014. through the sponsorship of the associated Departments of Physics and Philosophy and College of Arts & Sciences at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Continue reading →The Galileo Myth
Article 4 pages Level: all audiences This article, published in the Jesuit magazine America in October 2020, provides a discussion of the scientific reasons behind opposition to Galileo, a discussion called for because the opposition to Galileo had recently been described in terms of “science denial”. The authors are Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory, and Christopher Graney, a historian of science and Adjunct Scholar with the Vatican Observatory. From the article: [T]he stories we tell ourselves are never really about the past or the future; they are about the times in which they are written…. We study what happened in history to imagine a better future. That is the immediate relevance of the Galileo story to us today. But we must be careful that the stories we tell ourselves do not fit too neatly into contemporary stereotypes like “science denialism.” If we do not diagnose problems correctly, we cannot come up with good solutions. Click here to access … Continue reading →
The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters
Article 23 pages Level: university This 2019 article by Daniel Stolzenberg, published in the history of science journal Isis, discusses the treatment of the Copernican theory by Roman officials in the decades after Galileo’s death, as seen in the case of the 1660 book Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius and its review by Fr. Athanasius Kircher, S. J. Stolzenberg argues for a reading of the of role of the Holy Office that is different from the usual one (where it is thought of as only serving to hinder the creation and communication of knowledge). The abstract of “The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters: Roman Censorship, Dutch Atlases, and the European Information Order, circa 1660” is as follows: This essay reconstructs the story of hidden collaborations between the Amsterdam bookseller Johannes Janssonius and the Roman Inquisition in 1660. It provides evidence that the papacy tacitly permitted the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book at a surprisingly early date and … Continue reading →
The Jesuits and Galileo: Fidelity to Tradition and the Adventure of Discovery
Article (PDF) 12 pages Level: university An article by Fr. George Coyne, S. J., in the journal Forum Italicum. Fr. Coyne, who was Director of the Vatican Observator from 1978 to 2006, writes: This paper investigates the tensions within the Society of Jesus, especially at the Roman College, at the time of Galileo and how they were resolved (or not) in a spirit of accommodation which was maturing at that time and which has entered into the Jesuit blood- stream. Jesuits at the Roman College confirmed Galileo’s earth-shaking observations, reported in his Sidereus Nuntius. Aristotle’s physics was crumbling. Would Aristotelian philosophy, which was at the service of theology, also collapse? Controversies over the nature of sunspots and of comets held implications for the very foundations of Christian belief. Some Jesuits saw the threat and faced it with an astute view into the future; others, though pioneers as scientists, could not face the larger implications of the scientific revolution to which they … Continue reading →
The Jesuits and Galileo: Fidelity to Tradition and the Adventure of Discovery
This paper aims to delineate two of the many tensions which bring to light the contrasting views of Galileo Galilei and of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine with respect to the Copernican-Ptolemaic controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries: their respective positions on Aristotles natural philosophy and on the interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
Continue reading →The Parallel Worlds of Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei
Article 14 pages Level: high school and above This 2016 article—written by Oddbjørn Engvold of the University of Oslo, Norway, and Jack B. Zirker, of the National Solar Observatory, USA, and published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy—provides an overview that compares and contrasts the solar observations made by Galileo Galilei on one hand, and by Christoph Scheiner of the Society of Jesus on the other. While Galileo is better known, Scheiner would go on to study the sun far more extensively that Galileo, and to become the world’s first true solar astronomer. Engvold and Zirker write: Scheiner was a keen observer, who shares with Galileo the credit of discovering and describing many of the sunspot phenomena we know today. He recorded the behaviour of sunspots, sometime several times per day, allegedly over 16 years. From this mass of data, he deduced several important properties of the Sun, such as the latitude variation of rotation, as well as … Continue reading →
The Work of the Best and Greatest Artist: A Forgotten Story of Religion, Science, and Stars in the Copernican Revolution
Article (PDF) 29 pages Level: high school and above This 2012 article from Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture presents the following argument: In 1576 the English astronomer Thomas Digges (1546–95) published his English translation of Nicholaus Copernicus’s (1473–1543) De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium together with a sketch of the Copernican universe under the heading “A Perfit description of the Cœlestial Orbes”. Because Digges’s sketch shows the planets circling the Sun, surrounded by an infinite expanse of stars, it is often hailed as a forerunner of the modern, scientific understanding of an infinite universe in which the Earth is but a speck. However, Digges was illustrating not the insignificance of Earth but the greatness of a universe of stars that testified to the omnipotence and magnificence of God. Ideas such as Digges’s played a prominent role in Copernican thought, so much so that Copernicans cited Divine Omnipotence to answer one of the most powerful scientific objections to the heliocentric theory. … Continue reading →
The Young Bellarmine’s Thoughts on World Systems
Link to an academic article published on the occasion of the publication of the autograph copy of Bellarmine’s Declaration of 1616 to Galileo, where the authors look into the roots of Bellarmine’s attitudes towards what we now call cosmology
Continue reading →A True Demonstration: Bellarmine and the Stars as Evidence Against Earth’s Motion in the Early Seventeenth Century
Article (PDF) 17 pages Level: high school and above This 2011 article from Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture presents the following argument: In 1615 Robert Cardinal Bellarmine demanded a “true demonstration” of Earth’s motion before he would cease to doubt the Copernican world system. No such demonstration was available because the geocentric Tychonic world system was a viable alternative to the heliocentric Copernican system. On the contrary, recent work concerning early observations of stars suggests that, thanks to astronomers’ misunderstanding of the images of stars seen through the telescope, the only “true demonstration” the telescope provided in Bellarmine’s day showed the earth not to circle the Sun. This had been discussed by the German astronomer Simon Marius, in his Mundus Iovialis, just prior to Bellarmine’s request for a “true demonstration.” Click here to download “A True Demonstration: Bellarmine and the Stars as Evidence Against Earth’s Motion in the Early Seventeenth Century” directly from Logos. Click here to download … Continue reading →
Bellarmine in Perspective
An oft-quoted quip suggests Bellarmine was a better scientist than Galileo, while Galileos letter to the Grand Duchess showed him to be a better theologian than Bellarmine. As serious analysis, the quip falls short of the mark. The real problem with both parties is that our modern idea of what science is and how it proceeds was only just being born at this time.
Continue reading →Decree of Approval for the work “Elements of Astronomy” by Giuseppe Settele, in support of the heliocentric system (1820)
Article 300 words Level: all audiences The 1820 decree under Pope Pius VII removing all remaining prohibitions against the Copernican system. This arose from the request of Fr. Giuseppe Settele for an imprimatur on his book Elementi di ottica e di astronomia (Elements of Optics and Astronomy), which referenced Earth’s motion. The request was denied; Settele appealed to the Pope. This translation is from the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti. The translation is from the original Latin provided in W. Brandmüller and E.J. Greipl, eds., Copernico, Galilei e la chiesa : fine della controversia (1820) : gli atti del Sant’Uffizio {i.e. Copernicus, Galileo, and the Church: The End of the Controversy (1820), Acts of the Holy Office} (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1992), pp. 300-301. [Rome], 1820 VIII 16 Vol. I, fol. 174v (Bruni, scribe) The Assessor of the Holy Office has referred the … Continue reading →
Galileo’s Telescopic Observations: The Marvel and Meaning of Discovery
Link to an article published for the IAU Symposium. Galileo’s Medicean Moons: Their Impact on 400 Years of Discovery. For the first time in over 2,000 years new significant observational data had been put at the disposition of anyone who cared to think, not in abstract preconceptions but in obedience to what the universe had to say about itself.
Continue reading →Galileo’s Newly-Discovered Letter
Article (blog post) 2800 words Level: high school and above In 2018 the journal Nature announced that a previously-unknown copy of one of Galileo’s letters had been discovered in the archives of the Royal Society—and Nature stated that the new copy showed Galileo to have lied. Christopher Graney discusses this letter (which was arguably the event that set the “Galileo Affair” into motion) in a posting on the Vatican Observatory’s blog, The Catholic Astronomer, and also discusses the Nature announcement, the science of Galileo’s time, and the people involved with the letter. Click here to read the entire blog posting from The Catholic Astronomer.
Continue reading →How Frs. Riccioli and Dechales Argued that Science Shows the Earth to be at Rest – The Coriolis Effect
Article (blog post) 600 words Level: all audiences In this post on The Catholic Astronomer blog, Christopher Graney discusses how the effect of Earth’s rotation on objects travelling through the air (now known as the “Coriolis effect”) was foreseen by Jesuit scientists, who argued that the absence of this effect indicated that Copernicus was wrong about the Earth being in motion. This scientific argument against the Earth’s motion turned out to be wrong because the effect did in fact exist, but was very hard to detect. Click here to read the full article on The Catholic Astronomer – the blog of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.
Continue reading →Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
Article 1000 words Level: all audiences This article by Christopher Graney was originally published by Aeon, and later republished by The Atlantic and others. It discusses astronomical work published in 1614 by Johann Georg Locher, a student of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner. There is a great contrast between how Galileo portrayed Locher’s work, and the work itself. Graney writes, “Locher matters. Science’s history matters. Anti-Copernicans such as Locher and Brahe show that science has always functioned as a contest of ideas, and that science was present in both sides of the vigorous debate over Earth’s motion.” Click here for this article from Aeon. Click here for this article from The Atlantic.
Continue reading →The Church and Galileo, by Ernan McMullin
Book 408 pages Level: university A book edited by Fr. Ernan McMullin in 2005. From the web site of the publisher, the University of Notre Dame Press: This collection of first-rate essays aims to provide an accurate scholarly assessment of the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and Galileo. In 1981, Pope John Paul II established a commission to inquire into the Church’s treatment of Galileo “in loyal recognition of wrongs, from whatever side they came,” hoping this way to “dispel the mistrust . . . between science and faith.” When the Galileo Commission finally issued its report in 1992, many scholars were disappointed by its inadequacies and its perpetuation of old defensive stratagems. This volume attempts what the Commission failed to provide—a historically accurate, scholarly, and balanced account of Galileo and his difficult relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Contributors provide careful analyses of the interactions of the Church and Galileo over the thirty years between 1612 and his … Continue reading →
The Galileo Myth
Article 4 pages Level: all audiences This article, published in the Jesuit magazine America in October 2020, provides a discussion of the scientific reasons behind opposition to Galileo, a discussion called for because the opposition to Galileo had recently been described in terms of “science denial”. The authors are Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory, and Christopher Graney, a historian of science and Adjunct Scholar with the Vatican Observatory. From the article: [T]he stories we tell ourselves are never really about the past or the future; they are about the times in which they are written…. We study what happened in history to imagine a better future. That is the immediate relevance of the Galileo story to us today. But we must be careful that the stories we tell ourselves do not fit too neatly into contemporary stereotypes like “science denialism.” If we do not diagnose problems correctly, we cannot come up with good solutions. Click here to access … Continue reading →
The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters
Article 23 pages Level: university This 2019 article by Daniel Stolzenberg, published in the history of science journal Isis, discusses the treatment of the Copernican theory by Roman officials in the decades after Galileo’s death, as seen in the case of the 1660 book Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius and its review by Fr. Athanasius Kircher, S. J. Stolzenberg argues for a reading of the of role of the Holy Office that is different from the usual one (where it is thought of as only serving to hinder the creation and communication of knowledge). The abstract of “The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters: Roman Censorship, Dutch Atlases, and the European Information Order, circa 1660” is as follows: This essay reconstructs the story of hidden collaborations between the Amsterdam bookseller Johannes Janssonius and the Roman Inquisition in 1660. It provides evidence that the papacy tacitly permitted the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book at a surprisingly early date and … Continue reading →
The Jesuits and Galileo: Fidelity to Tradition and the Adventure of Discovery
Article (PDF) 12 pages Level: university An article by Fr. George Coyne, S. J., in the journal Forum Italicum. Fr. Coyne, who was Director of the Vatican Observator from 1978 to 2006, writes: This paper investigates the tensions within the Society of Jesus, especially at the Roman College, at the time of Galileo and how they were resolved (or not) in a spirit of accommodation which was maturing at that time and which has entered into the Jesuit blood- stream. Jesuits at the Roman College confirmed Galileo’s earth-shaking observations, reported in his Sidereus Nuntius. Aristotle’s physics was crumbling. Would Aristotelian philosophy, which was at the service of theology, also collapse? Controversies over the nature of sunspots and of comets held implications for the very foundations of Christian belief. Some Jesuits saw the threat and faced it with an astute view into the future; others, though pioneers as scientists, could not face the larger implications of the scientific revolution to which they … Continue reading →
The Parallel Worlds of Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei
Article 14 pages Level: high school and above This 2016 article—written by Oddbjørn Engvold of the University of Oslo, Norway, and Jack B. Zirker, of the National Solar Observatory, USA, and published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy—provides an overview that compares and contrasts the solar observations made by Galileo Galilei on one hand, and by Christoph Scheiner of the Society of Jesus on the other. While Galileo is better known, Scheiner would go on to study the sun far more extensively that Galileo, and to become the world’s first true solar astronomer. Engvold and Zirker write: Scheiner was a keen observer, who shares with Galileo the credit of discovering and describing many of the sunspot phenomena we know today. He recorded the behaviour of sunspots, sometime several times per day, allegedly over 16 years. From this mass of data, he deduced several important properties of the Sun, such as the latitude variation of rotation, as well as … Continue reading →
The Work of the Best and Greatest Artist: A Forgotten Story of Religion, Science, and Stars in the Copernican Revolution
Article (PDF) 29 pages Level: high school and above This 2012 article from Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture presents the following argument: In 1576 the English astronomer Thomas Digges (1546–95) published his English translation of Nicholaus Copernicus’s (1473–1543) De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium together with a sketch of the Copernican universe under the heading “A Perfit description of the Cœlestial Orbes”. Because Digges’s sketch shows the planets circling the Sun, surrounded by an infinite expanse of stars, it is often hailed as a forerunner of the modern, scientific understanding of an infinite universe in which the Earth is but a speck. However, Digges was illustrating not the insignificance of Earth but the greatness of a universe of stars that testified to the omnipotence and magnificence of God. Ideas such as Digges’s played a prominent role in Copernican thought, so much so that Copernicans cited Divine Omnipotence to answer one of the most powerful scientific objections to the heliocentric theory. … Continue reading →
Galileo – History, Science and Faith
Video One hour Level: all audiences Fr. Christopher Corbally, S. J., a research astronomer at the Vatican Observatory since 1983, provides a short history of Galileo, his science, and his interactions with the Church.
Continue reading →The Galileo Affair: Context and Controversy
Video 1 hour 20 minutes (includes 15 minutes Q&A) Level: all audiences Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., an astronomer with the Vatican Observatory, delivered “The Galileo Affair: Context and Controversy” in the University at Albany Lecture Center. on November 19, 2014. through the sponsorship of the associated Departments of Physics and Philosophy and College of Arts & Sciences at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Continue reading →A True Demonstration: Bellarmine and the Stars as Evidence Against Earth’s Motion in the Early Seventeenth Century
Article (PDF) 17 pages Level: high school and above This 2011 article from Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture presents the following argument: In 1615 Robert Cardinal Bellarmine demanded a “true demonstration” of Earth’s motion before he would cease to doubt the Copernican world system. No such demonstration was available because the geocentric Tychonic world system was a viable alternative to the heliocentric Copernican system. On the contrary, recent work concerning early observations of stars suggests that, thanks to astronomers’ misunderstanding of the images of stars seen through the telescope, the only “true demonstration” the telescope provided in Bellarmine’s day showed the earth not to circle the Sun. This had been discussed by the German astronomer Simon Marius, in his Mundus Iovialis, just prior to Bellarmine’s request for a “true demonstration.” Click here to download “A True Demonstration: Bellarmine and the Stars as Evidence Against Earth’s Motion in the Early Seventeenth Century” directly from Logos. Click here to download … Continue reading →
Discovery in the New Cosmology of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo
Article (PDF) 14 pages, 6100 words Level: university This article for the Paths of Discovery (published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) by Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, suggests “three components contained in the notion of discovery: newness, an opening to the future and, in the case of astronomical discovery, a blending of theory and observation. Discovery means that something new comes to light and this generally happens suddenly and unexpectedly.” Click here for a link to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ entire Paths of Discovery volume. [Click here to download PDF]
Continue reading →Galileo and Bellarmine
In order to appreciate the marvel and the true significance of Galileo’s observations we must appreciate the historical precedents which will have important repercussions on the intellectual climate in Europe at the time of Galileo and, therefore, on the critical intellectual period through which Galileo himself was passing at the time those observations were made.
Continue reading →Galileo and His Times
A critical reading of the results from the 1992 Papal commission on Galileo
Continue reading →Science Meets Biblical Exegesis in the Galileo Affair
Could the Galileo affair, interpreted with historical accuracy, provide an opportunity to come to understand the relationship of contemporary scientific culture and inherited religious culture?
Continue reading →The Church’s Most Recent Attempt to Dispel the Galileo Myth
This paper investigates the tensions within the Society of Jesus, especially at the Roman College, at the time of Galileo and how they were resolved or not in a spirit of accommodation which was maturing at that time and which has entered into the Jesuit bloodstream.
Continue reading →The Jesuits and Galileo: Fidelity to Tradition and the Adventure of Discovery
This paper aims to delineate two of the many tensions which bring to light the contrasting views of Galileo Galilei and of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine with respect to the Copernican-Ptolemaic controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries: their respective positions on Aristotles natural philosophy and on the interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
Continue reading →The Young Bellarmine’s Thoughts on World Systems
Link to an academic article published on the occasion of the publication of the autograph copy of Bellarmine’s Declaration of 1616 to Galileo, where the authors look into the roots of Bellarmine’s attitudes towards what we now call cosmology
Continue reading →Bellarmine – The Louvain Lectures
Louvain lectures of Bellarmine and the autograph copy of his 1616 declaration to Galileo. Texts in the original Latin and Italian with English translation. Introduction, commentary, and notes.
Continue reading →Mathematical Disquisitions – The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo
Book 176 pages Level: high school and above This 2017 book by Christopher M. Graney is the first complete English translation of an astronomical text written by scientists who stood opposite Galileo in the debate on the question of Earth’s motion. Galileo painted a very unfavorable portrait of Mathematical Disquisitions and its Jesuit authors, but the book itself turns out to be a competent scientific work and not much like Galileo’s portrayal of it. From the publisher, the University of Notre Dame Press: Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo offers a new English translation of the 1614 Disquisitiones Mathematicae, which Johann Georg Locher wrote under the guidance of the German Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner. The booklet, an anti-Copernican astronomical work, is of interest in large part because Galileo Galilei, who came into conflict with Scheiner over the discovery of sunspots, devoted numerous pages within his famous 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican to ridiculing Disquisitiones. The brief text (the … Continue reading →