Galileo's Dream (49 page)
Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
And of course Galileo gave it in full, kneeling and bowing to kiss the sandaled feet, which were perfectly clean and white.
“Rise, my Galileo. Speak to us standing upright.”
As he did so Galileo bit his tongue, checking the congratulations he had prepared. There was no question now of suggesting there had been anything won, or that the matter could have turned out any other way; one had to act as if things had always been like this. Referring to the past would have been a faux pas, even an impertinence. Silently Galileo kissed the big ring on the pontiff's offered hand. Urban nodded coolly. He let Ciampoli speak for him, only nodding to indicate his approval of what was said, and occasionally murmuring things Galileo could barely hear. One curious glance was sharp, then he returned to the contemplation of some inner landscape. Even for Galileo, his favored scientist, he could not be bothered to be entirely present. It was as if the carapace of power he now wore was so heavy that he needed to attend to it always, and so thick that he did not believe anyone could penetrate it. Now he lived alone, at all times and in all places. Even his brother Antonio watched him as if observing a new acquaintance.
Ciampoliâalways one of Galileo's most peculiar and unhelpful advocates, a man boundless in enthusiasm but shaky in everything elseânow spoke eagerly of Galileo's accomplishments, in ways that pitched them too high, that caused Urban's gaze at the flowers to sharpen again for a second as he tilted his head to listen. Barberini knew Galileo's story already, and clearly this was not the moment to rehearse it. Why Ciampoli had been named Urban's secretary was beyond Galileo to tell.
Soon Urban lifted a hand, and Ciampoli saw, well after Galileo, that the interview was over. Nervously, Ciampoli thanked Galileo for coming, speaking for Urban just as he had a moment before been speaking for Galileo. He was enunciating both halves of the conversation! Then he led Galileo away. No more than five minutes had passed.
Out in the vast antechamber Ciampoli repeated what he had written already in his letters, that he had been reading
Il Saggiatore
aloud
to the pope during meals, and that Urban had laughed and called for more. “I am sure you are now free to write anything you want, about astronomy or anything else.”
But Ciampoli was a fool. He had speculated aloud that he was Virgil reincarnated, or perhaps Ovid. He wrote verses making fun of Urban behind Urban's back, then distributed these verses to friends like Cesi and Galileo and others, as if the poems would not then eventually circulate and land in the hands of his enemiesâand more important, in the hands of Galileo's enemies.
So now Galileo merely nodded at him and murmured sounds of agreement, deeply irritated and uneasy. That his audience with Urban had gone less well than the ones he had had with Paul! It was startling, disturbingâhard to believe.
Thinking it over intensively in the days that followed, it finally occurred to him that old friends and favored ones were precisely the people that a new pope had to put in their place, which was at the same distance as everyone else: below. A very great distance below.
Clearly he would need another meeting with Urban, without Ciampoli on hand to get in the way. But how to get that was not obvious. Possibly no one ever met privately with this pope.
The next morning he visited Cardinal Francesco Barberini. They met in the little courtyard just inside the wall of the Villa Barberini, overlooking the brown Tiber.
It could be honestly said at this point that Galileo had helped Francesco more than Francesco had helped him. Francesco seemed perfectly willing to acknowledge this; he was gracious, he was grateful, he was without the slightest tinge of that resentment that gratitude so often contains. It was a truly enjoyable meeting rather than the pretense of one, full of laughter and shared memories. Francesco was taller than Urban and more handsome, sanguine and affable, with a big head like a Roman statue's. His cardinal's robes and regalia had been made in Paris, where he had lived for several years. That he had been one of the least effective diplomats in Vatican history was not so widely known.
He sounded encouraging when Galileo gingerly brought up the
subject of Copernicanism. “My uncle once told me,” he said, “that if it had been up to him in 1616, you would not have been forbidden to write on this subject. That was Paul's issue, or Bellarmino's.”
Galileo nodded thoughtfully. “That seems right,” he said as he unpacked a microscope he had brought with him to show peopleâa kind of telescope of the small, which gave observers new and astounding views of the unsuspected detail and articulation of all the smallest things, including flies and moths, and now, because a trio of bees formed the Barberini family emblem, bees.
Francesco looked into the eyepiece and grinned. “The sting is like a little sword! And those eyes!” He held Galileo by the shoulder. “You always have something new. His Holiness my uncle likes that. You should show it to him.”
“I will if I can. Maybe you can help me?”
But before he next met with the pope, Galileo gave the device to Cardinal Frederick Eutel von Zollern, in the hope of gaining more support from Catholics north of the Alps. The first meeting with Urban had thrown him off his stride. He complained of the endless procession of meetings and banquets, and wrote back to Florence that being a courtier was a young man's business.
Indeed, in his monomaniacal focus on his own affairs, he did not even seem to notice the matter that was consuming everyone else in Rome at this time, which was the war between Catholic France and Catholic Spain. This conflict was beginning to engulf all of Europe, with no end in sight. The Barberini were closely associated with the French court, as Francesco's history made clear; but France recently had developed Protestant allies. Their foes, the Spanish Hapsburgs, still controlled both Naples and several duchies in northern Italy, squeezing Rome between them. They had immediate power in Rome as well, being the Church's principal financial support. So despite his French sympathies, Urban could not openly oppose the Spaniards. In theory he could as pope tell all the Catholic crowns what to do, but in practice that hadn't been true for centuries, if it ever had been, and now the two Catholic countries ignored him as they foughtâor worse, threatened him for not supporting their side. Despite his wealth and the authority of St. Peter, in his foreign relations Urban was finding he had to walk a line even finer than the one on which
Paul had balanced: a kind of thread across the abyss, with war waiting below if he fell off.
After about a month in Rome, Father Riccardi, whom Philip III of Spain had long ago nicknamed Father Monster, agreed to a meeting with Galileo to discuss the question of Holy Office censorship and the ban of 1616. This meeting was crucial to Galileo's hopes, so he was pleased when it was scheduled.
But in the meeting itself, Riccardi was very clear and unequivocal. His views were only Urban's here, Riccardi said, and the pope wanted Copernicanism to remain theory only, with never a suggestion that it had any basis in physical fact. “I myself am sure that angels move all the heavenly bodies,” Riccardi added at the end of this warning. “Who else could do it, seeing that these things are in the heavens?”
Galileo nodded unhappily.
“Don't concern yourself too much,” Riccardi advised. “We judge that Copernicanism is merely rash, rather than perverse or heretical. But the fact of the matter is, this is no time to be rash.”
“Do you think it's possible that the pope could say that the theory is permissible to be discussed as a hypothetical mathematical construct only
, ex suppositione?”
“Perhaps. I will ask him about that.”
Galileo settled in to Guiducci's house in Rome. He had begun to understand that his visit needed to be a campaign. Weeks passed, then months. Urban agreed to see him several times, although they were for the most part very formal and brief occasions, and in the company of others. At no time did Urban meet his eye.
Only during his final audience of the visit did the matter of Copernicus come up, and even then, only accidentally. Ciampoli was the one who raised the subject, seizing a lull in the conversation to remark, “Signor Galilei's fable concerning the cicada and the varying origins of music was both witty and profound, wasn't it? I recall you said it was your favorite part when I read it to you.”
Galileo, his face reddening, watched the pope closely. Urban continued
to contemplate a bed of flowers, apparently still thinking of other things. Even in the months of Galileo's stay, the carapace of papal power had thickened on him. His eyes were glazed; sometimes he stared at Galileo as if trying to remember who he was.
But now he said, “Yes,” firmly, as if waking up. He shifted his absent gaze to Galileo, looked him straight in the eye for a second, then looked at the flowers again. “Yes, it seemed to refer to what we have spoken of before. A parable of God's omnipotence, which is sometimes overlooked in philosophical discussions, it seems to us, although we see the power everywhere. As we are sure you will agree.”
“Of course, Holiest Holiness.” Galileo gestured helplessly at the garden. “Everything illustrates that.”
“Yes. And because God is omnipotent, there is no way for mankind to be sure of the physical cause of anything whatsoever. Isn't that right.”
“Yesâ¦.” But Galileo's head tilted to the side, despite his efforts to stay motionless and deferent. “Although one has to remember that God created logic, too. And it is clear He is logical.”
“But He is not
confined
by logic, because He is omnipotent. So, whether a physical explanation is logical or not, whether it conserves the appearances poorly or adequately, or even with perfect precision, all that makes no difference when it comes to determining that explanation's actual truth in the physical world. Because if God had wanted to do it otherwise, He could have. If He wanted to do it one way while making it look like another way, He could do that too.”
“I cannot imagine that God would want to deceive Hisâ”
“Not deceive! God does not deceive. That would be as if to say God lied. It is men who deceive themselves, by thinking they can understand God's work by their own reasoning.” Another round-eyed quick look, sharp and dangerous. “If God had wanted to construct a world that looked like it ran one way, when actually it ran another way, even a supposedly impossible way, then that is perfectly within His abilities. And we have no way to judge His intentions or desires. For any mere mortal to assert otherwise would be an attempted restriction on God's omnipotence. So any time we assert that a phenomenon has only a single cause, we offend Him. As your curious and beautiful fable makes so eloquently clear.”
“Yes,” Galileo said, thinking hard. Again he thought, but could not say,
But why would God lie to us?
And so he had to think of something else. “We see through a glass darkly,” he admitted.
“Exactly.”
“And so, this line of argument suggests that anything can be supposed?” Galileo dared to ask. “Theories, or simply patterns seen, and only expressed
ex suppositione?”
“I am sure you will always, in all your studies and writing, continue to make our argument for omnipotence. This is the work God has sent you to do. When you make this ultimate point clear, then all your philosophy is blessed. There is no contradiction to our teaching.”
“Yes, Sanctissimus.”
Escorting Galileo out of the Vatican after the audience, Ciampoli was ecstatic. “That was His Holiness telling you to proceed! He said that if you included his argument then you can discuss any given theory you like! He has given you permission to write about Copernicus, do you see?”
“Yes,” Galileo said shortly. He himself could not be sure what Urban had meant. Barberini had changed.
Even with his telescope the lynx-eyed astrologer cannot look into the inner thoughts of the mind.
âF
RA
O
RAZIO
G
RASSI
S
O
G
ALILEO RETURNED TO
F
LORENCE,
willing to believe that Urban had given him permission to describe the Copernican explanation as a theoretical constructâa mathematical abstraction that could account for the observed planetary motions. And if he made the supposition convincing enough, the pope might then give it his approval, as he had the various arguments in
Il Saggiatore
. And then all would be well.
And so, over the next several years, he wrote his
Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems
, which was known around the house as the
Dialogo
. He wrote it in fits and starts, between interruptions required by the grand duke, or by his family situation, or by illnesses; but always one way or another he kept at it, as if under some kind of compulsion.
In those years, the first question every day was whether Galileo would be well enough to get up. Every time he was ill, it could be just
a febbre efimera
, a one-day fever, or on the other hand something that would fell him for a month or two. Everyone feared his illnesses as being little catastrophes in the household's routine; but of course the plague also was abroad, and so his complaints could always be the harbinger
of something much worse. One day, one of the workshop's glassblowers died of plague, which gave them all a terrible fright. Galileo closed the workshop, so the artisans had nothing to do; they shifted out to the field, the barn and granary, the vineyard and cellar. Bellosguardo now served as farm to the convent of San Matteo, and that took a lot of work. And it was true that out in the open air, the plague seemed less of a danger. Out under the sky, tall clouds billowing over the green hills, it looked safer.
Some could not shake the plague fear, however. Galileo's son Vincenzio and his new wife Sestilia, a wonderful woman, moved away from Florence for a time, leaving their infant behind in the care of La Piera and a wet nurse. Why they left the babe no one could understand, and everyone assumed it was yet more of Vincenzio's spineless ditherings. No one could figure out why Sestilia Bocchineri had married him. There was a lot of gossip about it. Galileo's household at this time numbered about fifty people, including still the family of his brother Michelangelo, who played on in Munich. Views on the explanation for Sestilia were split between the notion that Galileo had found her in Venice and paid her to marry his son, or that God had noticed Galileo's uncharacteristic visit to the house of the Virgin Mary, in Loreto, the month before Sestilia had appeared in their lives, and had therefore rewarded his devotion. This sacred home of the Virgin Mary Casa Santa, had landed in Loreto during the Crusades, after flying across the Mediterranean from the Holy Land to escape destruction at the hands of the Saracens. Galileo on his return from his pilgrimage had been heard to remark that the place had a pretty good foundation, all things considered, but God could have ignored that impertinence and blessed his family anyway. There had to be some explanation for a girl as good as Sestilia going for a sponge like Vincenzio.
Every morning, rain or shine, was punctuated by the awful sounds of the maestro waking up. He would groan no matter how he felt, then curse, then shout for breakfast, for wine, for help getting out of bed. “Come here!” he would bark, “I need to hit somebody.” After drinking several cups of tea or watered wine, he would get up and dress, go out and limp around his garden, inspecting the many varieties of citrons he had planted in big terra-cotta pots, on the way down to the jakes to
relieve himself. On his way back up he would limp, moaning again, and often stop in the bean and wheat fields, fingering the stalks and leaves.
When he returned to the house they could tell whether he was feeling in good health that day or not. If he was, then all was well. The house would begin to buzz with the work of the day. If he wasn't, he would crawl back into his bed and cry hoarsely for La Piera, the only one who could deal with him in these crises. “Pee!âair!âaaaaah!” Then everyone would fall silent, and a gloom would settle on the place as we prepared to wait out another period of illness. There were so many of them.
But if things were well with him, he would go to a big marble-topped table that he had had set up under the arches on the front side of the villa, in the shade and the cool, out of the rain but in the clean air, and the light that he required. He sat before it in a chair with cushioning contoured to support his hernia, which allowed him to take off his iron truss. His Padua notebooks and the fair copies made by Guiducci and Arrigheti lay stacked on the desk according to a system that the servants all had to respect unfailingly or else they would be kicked and struck and horribly cursed. As the morning progressed, he paged through these volumes thoughtfully, studying them as if they had been written by someone else; and then, leaving one or two of them open, he would take up blank sheets of parchment, his quill and inkpot, and begin to write. He would only write for an hour, two at the mostâeither chuckling or swearing under his breath, or heaving great sighs; or reading sentences aloud, amending them, trying different versions, writing drafts on blank loose sheets or the backs of notebook pages that had not been filled. Later he would transcribe what he liked onto new blank pages, and when they were full, file them with the other finished pages in a particular pigeonhole of a cabinet set on the desk. Sometimes when finishing for the day he would shuffle the pages to make the stack of them appear higher. Some days he wrote a page or two, other days twenty or thirty.
Then with a final loud groan he would stand, stretching like a cat, and call for wine. He drank the cups off in a couple of swallows, then strapped on his truss and took another walk in his fields. If it was late enough for good shade, he would sit on a stool and move down the rows of vegetables, pulling out weeds with the stab of a little trowel. He took great satisfaction in killing weeds, filling bushels with them
for the compost heap down by the jakes. Sometimes he would hurry back up to the villa to write down something good that had occurred to him in the garden, orating the idea so as not to forget it. “Oh, the inexpressible baseness of abject minds!” he would shout as he limped up the hill. “To make themselves slaves willingly! To call themselves convinced by arguments that are so
powerful
that they can't even tell what they mean. What is this but to make an oracle out of a log of wood, and run to it for answers! To fear it! To fear a book! A hunk of wood!”
Another time, limping hastily uphill: “For every effect in nature, some idiot says he has a complete understanding! This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than
never understanding anything
. For anyone who had experienced
just once
the understanding of
one single thing
, thus truly tasting how knowledge is accomplished, would then recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands
nothing.”
Shouting this at the top of his lungs, down at Florence, out at the world. Writing it down as he pronounced it again. Back and forth, from desk to garden to desk.
In the late afternoon, if it was nice, he would usually stay in the arcade until sundown, writing faster than ever, or reading in his notebooks as he drank more wine. He would watch the sunset, for those few moments seeming at ease. He would sketch the clouds if there were any. The blue of the sky was something he never tired of. “It's just as beautiful as the colors of a rainbow,” he would insist. “Indeed, I say the sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”
On many afternoons a letter would arrive from Maria Celeste. These he always opened and read immediately, frowning with worry as he began, but often enough then smiling, even bursting into laughter. He loved these letters and the candied fruit that often accompanied them, tucked in a basket that he would then send back to her filled with food. He often sat down and wrote his reply to her on the spot, eating candies as he wrote, then calling for La Piera to prepare the basket for return that same day.
He liked to write, it appeared; and when he was writing, life at Bel-losguardo was good. There were hours when he would just sit there contentedly, staring at nothing,
grattare il corpo
as the saying goes, scratching his belly in the sun: very rare for Galileo. He withdrew from the world at large, and ignored even matters he should have attended
to. He neglected his court duties, and paid no attention to the larger European situation, or indeed anything outside the villa beyond his scientific correspondence, which was always voluminous. The household was happy.
But ignoring the European situation was a mistake. And he should have been paying more attention to what people were learning about Pope Urban VIII as the months and years passed. For people in Rome were telling stories. It was said, for instance, that Galileo had again been denounced to the Inquisition. The denunciation was anonymous, but was said to have been made by one of his enemies among the Jesuits, perhaps even Grassi, whom he had made such fun of in
Il Saggiatore
. Because Grassi had hidden behind a pseudonym, Galileo had been free to stick his supposedly unknown opponent mercilessly. Sarsi's subsequent rebuttals had been just as sharp; he had referred to
Il
Saggiatore
as
L'Assaggiatore
, The Wine-Taster, which everyone laughed at, except Galileo.
But that was just a joke. A denunciation to the Holy Office of the Congregation was a very different thing. One rumor said that the denunciation had nothing to do with the banned Copernican world system, but rather with something about the atomistic views of the Greeks. Bruno had spoken for atomism; the war with the Protestant countries in northern Europe was supposedly being fought over atomism, because of what it implied about transubstantiation. So it was potentially more dangerous even than discussing the two world systems, and yet Galileo was unaware that it even constituted a problem.
Then there were other, more public signs of trouble. Urban was beginning to flex his papal powers, taking on with gusto the traditional task of rebuilding Rome. He decided to build an arch over the altar in St. Peter's, under which only he could conduct services. And since beams long enough to span the altar were no longer available on the deforested slopes of the Apennines, his builders raided the Pantheon and took most of its beams away, almost wrecking the ancient building. “What the barbarians failed to do, the Barberini finished off,” people said of this vandalism. Slogans like this were only the surface of a growing undercurrent of dislike for the new pope. “On ascension, the bees turned to horseflies,” people were saying. The
Avvisi
began to
print rhymed attacks on the pope, and alarming horoscopes that predicted his imminent death. Urban had a now rather old-fashioned obsession with astrology, and these scurrilous dark horoscopes disturbed him so much that he made it a capital crime to predict a pope's death. After that no more were published, but the word was out, the feeling was abroad. Popes were appointed in old age for a reason; good or bad, they did not last long, and the frequent succession of doddering elders kept churning the pots of patronage. But Urban was hale in his fifties, and full of nervous choleric energy.
His ambitions and problems of course ranged far beyond Rome. He continued to favor the French over the Spanish in their war, and so came to fear Spanish spies in the Vatican. And rightfully so, as there were many of them. He had not been pleased, people said, to learn of Galileo's attempt to sell the celatone and jovilabe to the Spanish military. And when he was not pleased it could go very badly. Once someone sneezed during a service he was conducting in St. Peter's, and afterward he decreed that anyone taking snuff in church would be excommunicated. Even more of an eye-opener was his decision to have Archbishop Mark Anthony de Dominis burned at the stake for heresy. De Dominis had already been dead for three months when this happened, having expired in the Castel Sant'Angelo after an interrogation by the Inquisition, but no matter; on the feast day of Doubting St. Thomas, the body was exhumed and taken to Campo dei Fiori and burned at the stake, its ashes then thrown into the Tiber. The offense that had outraged the pontiff to such a degree involved speaking about precisely this matter of atomism and transubstantiation for which Galileo had been secretly denounced.
But a heretic was a heretic, and anything could happen to them. Servants all across Italy were much more shocked by a new story that spread with the speed of amazement; Urban, oppressed by all his worries, had been having trouble sleeping at night, and it seemed to him that it was the chirping and singing of the birds in the Vatican gardens that was keeping him awake, and so he ordered them all killed. “He ordered his gardeners to kill every bird in the Vatican!” people said. “All the birds killed, so he can sleep better in the morning!” This was the man Galileo was trying to reason with.