A story
A fanciful story of mine, blending fact and fiction:
Ah, thought Galileo, as he wandered past the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome, one night, this looks to be the same now as it will and was a thousand years before and after me. Would that there could be a day when science was free. What once great Roman glory would pale beside that brightest light of day!
Galileo looked about and around and behind. No one was following him to his ultra secret lair and meeting place, where other scientists would join him again on this starry night, safe therein to congregate and discuss the forbidden topics.
[To this day no one has found Galileo’s lair, called The Church of Illumination, at least according to Dan Brown, but, then again, he identified it in his book. I am obtaining all this information about Galileo from his little known ‘lost’ diary. ]
…go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy: ‘tis nought
That ages, empires and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend,--they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time’s decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
(Shelley)
Galileo noted the ancient sculptures still standing against mouldering time, knowing that the new scientists arriving, if they were worthily smart enough, would have to use the clues provided as the way to the lair, for there was sturdy no map made up, the clues supposedly being written kind of in a tissue paper book.
As the word of this scientific brotherhood began to spread, scientists would travel thousands of miles but upon the slim hope of chancing a glance through Galileo’s telescope and discussing the master’s ideas.
Go thou to Rome,--at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation’s nakedness
Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;
(Shelley)
As Galileo wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that thronged the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his minding soul imbibed all the forms, this loveliness becoming a portion of himself, as well as its science, even right here, within the realm of the Holiness that shadowed him much as the darkness of night condemned the day.
And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
(Shelley)
Some had been burned before, thought Galileo, so ‘tis a difficult path to follow, yet the truth calls me forward… and so he had published the ‘Starry Messenger’.
Later on, Galileo had argued that the Holy Book had to be interpreted in the light of what science had shown to be true. Galileo had several opponents and they made sure that a copy of the ‘Letter to Castelli’ was sent to the Inquisition in Rome.
In 1616 Galileo wrote the ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess’ which vigorously attacked the followers of Aristotle. In this work, which he addressed to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, he argued strongly for a non-literal interpretation of Holy Scripture when the literal interpretation would contradict facts about the physical world proved by mathematical science.
… Galileo walked on slowly, for his health had become poor, and noted the setting moon—the sky would be wonderfully dark. He would soon be found guilty and condemned, but he knew none of that this night.
The eventual ‘Father of Science’ again sat with the scientific ‘Illuminati’ of his time, the discussions as free and glorious as ever…
He was later put under house arrest in his home in Florence, having by then nearly gone blind, but the starry memories of the Milky Way, the moons of Jupiter and more remained in a mind still free—that which could never be taken away.
His body was concealed and only placed in a fine tomb in the church in 1737 by the civil authorities against the wishes of many in the Church. On 31 October 1992, 350 years after Galileo’s death, Pope John Paul II gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo on a charge of heresy because of his belief that the Earth rotates round the sun. (Wiki) [Only that Galileo was wise.]
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