Galileo Affair - Dialogue

Dialogue

In 1623, Pope Gregory XV, died, and was succeeded by Pope Urban VIII, who showed greater favor to Galileo, particularly after Galileo traveled to Rome to congratulate the new Pontiff.

Dava Sobel explains that during this time, Urban had begun to fall more and more under the influence of court intrigue and problems of state. His friendship with Galileo began to take second place to his feelings of persecution and fear for his own life. At this low point in Urban's life, the problem of Galileo was presented to the pope by court insiders and enemies of Galileo. Coming on top of the recent claim by the then Spanish cardinal that Urban was soft on defending the church, he reacted out of anger and fear. This situation did not bode well for Galileo's defense of his book.

In his 1998 book, Scientific Blunders, Robert Youngson indicates that Galileo struggled for two years against the ecclesiastical censor to publish a book promoting heliocentrism. He claims the book passed only as a result of possible idleness or carelessness on the part of the censor, who was eventually dismissed. On the other hand, Jerome K. Langford and Raymond J. Seeger contend that Pope Urban and the Inquisition gave formal permission to publish the book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican. They claim Urban personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, to include Urban's own arguments, and for Galileo not to advocate heliocentrism.

The Dialogue, which was published in 1632 to great popularity, was an account of conversations between a Copernican scientist, Salviati, an impartial and witty scholar named Sagredo, and a ponderous Aristotelian named Simplicio, who employed stock arguments in support of geocentricity, and was depicted in the book as being an intellectually inept fool. Simplicio's arguments are systematically refuted and ridiculed by the other two characters with what Youngson calls "unassailable proof" for the Copernican theory (at least versus the theory of Ptolemy—as Finocchiaro points out, "the Copernican and Tychonic systems were observationally equivalent and the available evidence could be explained equally well by either"), which reduces Simplicio to baffled rage, and makes the author's position unambiguous. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also had the connotation of "simpleton." Although authors Langford and Stillman Drake assert that Simplicio was modeled on philosophers Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini, Pope Urban's demand for his own arguments to be included in the book resulted in Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio. Some months after the book's publication, Pope Urban VIII banned its sale and had its text submitted for examination by a special commission. Despite the fact that the decision of attributing the Pope's words to Simplicio was perceived as a mockery, some historians suggest that Galileo might have not acted out of malice.