Galileo: Heretic/Galileo Galilei:

...By and large the authors shy away from discussing the issues of the trial itself...

...Redondi has, as he admits," reconstructed a history" and thereby raised the awful suspicion that in the eyes of the church Galileo's heresy concerned a central dogma of the faith...

...Galileo's alleged disobedience to the 1616 warning against heliocentrism would not have merited such intensity...

...In short, it was alleged that Galileo's atomic theory is inconsistent with the dogma of transubstantiation solemnly defined by the Council of Trent...

...GALILEO GALILEI Toward a Resolution of 350 Years of Debate, 1633-1983 Edited by Paul Cardinal Poupard Translated by Ian Campbell Duquesne University, $28.00 208 pp...

...The Florentine scientist Galileo Galilei was immediately advised in no uncertain terms not to hold or defend Copernican-ism, a warning he heeded...

...George J. Bene, a French physicist, throws, cold water on this idea...

...One could perhaps be Catholic and Copernican, but one could not be Catholic without respecting the Tridentine postulate of the Eucharist...

...Redondi points out that Grassi's handwriting and the document's are similar...

...When Pope John Paul II appointed his own Galileo study commission in 1982, having asked for "a loyal recognition of errors, from whatever side they come," he probably did not anticipate such research as Pietro Redondi's...

...a new investigation would be seen ' 'as one more spectacle staged by the Catholic church...

...Those have long been accepted as the bare facts of the infamous Galileo affair...

...Redondi's case depends crucially on a document he discovered in the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an unsigned denunciation of Galileo, seven paragraphs long, evidently submitted to the Roman Inquisition in the 1620s, before Galileo published the Dialogue...

...After reading Galileo: Heretic one wonders whether the Galileo commission, if its work were to be conducted freely and thoroughly, would not investigate the church as much as one of the church's most famous victims.'s most famous victims...

...If all this is true, what was truly at issue in the Galileo affair might have been "the nominalist and atomist heresy against the dogma of the Eucharist...

...Robert L. Spaeth I in 1616 the Catholic church condemned Copernican astronomy...

...The soul experiences horror at the very thought.'' When Galileo's Dialogue came out, Urban VIII appointed a special investigating commission which met five times, keeping all proceedings secret...

...Redondi doesn't claim to have proved his thesis, but the facts he collects make it plausible and his brilliant rhetoric makes it persuasive...

...His book, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, although a bold discussion of the sensitive subject of planetary theories, was published in 1632 with ecclesiastical license...

...a few, perhaps not surprisingly, remain defensive on the church's behalf...

...Redondi believes it unlikely that such a procedure would have been used if only Galileo's "Copernican propensity" were at stake...

...Can John Paul really mean to rehabilitate Galileo, as if the great scientist's reputation somehow belongs to the church...

...Its ramifications and implications for the relations between science and the church have been debated for three and one-half centuries with little diminution in interest...

...Cardinal Paul Poupard, director of the commission, writes that the essays "are a work of clarification," though in fact they seem to add little or nothing to Galileo studies already in print...

...Among contemporary scientists, he writes,' 'there is no interest in going back to the trial...

...One closes this complex and fascinating book still skeptical but newly aware how convincing a tour de force of historical scholarship can be...

...But despite Galileo's caution, Pope Urban VIII ordered that he be tried on "vehement suspicion of heresy," and in 1633 Galileo was convicted and sentenced to life in prison (later commuted to house arrest), his works were suppressed, and he was forbidden ever to publish again...

...But is it true...

...And the pope himself angrily told the Florentine ambassador that "Galileo had dared enter where he should not, into the most grave and dangerous subjects that one could possibly raise at this moment...

...Of the three theologians composing the commission, two were experts on the Eucharist and the third was a "ferociously anti-Copernican" Jesuit...

...One product of the study to date is a collection of informative background essays whose English subtitle - "Toward a Resolution of 350 Years of Debate" - greatly exaggerates their importance...

...Moreover, in 1626, Grassi published a reply to The Assayer, making a similar allegation: "One must therefore infer, from what Galileo says, that heat and taste do not subsist in the host...

...The document bases its case against Galileo on his essay of 1623, The Assayer, which, among other things, offered a corpuscular theory of matter.If matter is only atoms in motion, the document argues, and if an object's taste, odor, and color are only subjective qualities, then "that makes greatly difficult the existence of the accidents of the bread and wine which in the Most Holy Sacrament are separated from their substance...

...He succeeds in his goal, "to restore the plot and its motives - from among the motives and passions of that time, to reconstruct another universe of politics, society, art, and religion, not simply of science...

...It is indeed difficult to imagine what he does expect...

...The eight essays - the work of mostly European, mostly clerical scholars - review Galileo's predecessors, the philosophy and theology of his era, and the reception of Galileo during the Enlightenment and in our time...

...Probably Galileo's accuser was Ora-zio Grassi, S. J., whose earlier pseudonymous essay, The Balance, Galileo had attacked and ridiculed in The Assayer...

...But none of the other writers seems to see any danger in a new investigation of the Galileo affair...

...Now an Italian historian, Pietro Redondi, has come forward with a startling and radical revisionist thesis, viz., that what brought Galileo down was not his great astronomical work but his previously published ideas on the physical composition of matter...

...The theological consulters of the Holy Office unanimously decided that heliocentrism was "stupid and absurd, and false in philosophy, and formally heretical, for it explicitly, and in many paragraphs, contradicts the sentences of holy Scripture...