Re: RATE Vol. II

I assure you, Janice, that my paraphrase and quotations of Bellarmine are
not taken out of context--that is, within the context of the lengthy article
from which I took the excerpt. Bellarmine wrote those words to the
Carmelite priest Paolo Antonio Foscarini, in response to Foscarini's book,
Letter on the Pythagorean and Copernican Opinion (1615). The website you
provide (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.html)
contains a probably unauthorized copy of a translation of the original
letter. In my article, I use the published translation by a leading modern
Galileo scholar, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary
History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 67-9.

I would agree that Bellarmine's comments could be "misused," by some
commentators. They are authentic, however, and in my article I note the
following things concerning the letter. (1) B acknowledged that if a
complete demonstration of the earth's motion were provided, that he was
prepared to admit that we did not understand the scriptures in question.
(Note the tone of this: he did not greet such a possibility with enthusiasm,
and he did not suggest what a new interpretation might look like, but he did
very grudgingly admit that we'd have to say we were wrong about what the
text means.) (2) B and Galileo alike agreed that a true demonstration of
the earth's motion would have to be a logically necessary demonstration, ie,
deductive in character rather than inductive as in modern science--the kind
of science that G was in the very process of creating. G thought he had
such a demonstration, in the tides and in the sunspots; but he did not, and
B realized that he did not. Such a demonstration is still not available
today, although almost no one in the modern West denies that the earth moves
around the sun. That is, the bar was set too high by both men, too high for
science ever to reach. (3) The astronomical tradition at the time claimed
only hypothetical truth for its theories, not actual truth--that is, success
only in predicting where bright spots would be seen on various evenings in
the future, not actual truth about the structure of the heavens. G was
changing that, as Copernicus and Kepler already had started to, but B never
accepted that and it (crucially) underlay his rejection of G's conclusions.
(4) B's interpretation of the relevant passages was tied closely to the
dictates of the Council of Trent, which maintained that Catholics were bound
hermeneutically by the unanimous agreement of the chuch fathers. And the
fathers, no great surprise, had interpreted such passages geocentrically in
those relatively rare cases when they did bother to comment on them. G was
therefore acting like a Protestant: telling the authorities of the ROman
Church how they ought to interpret certain passages, contrary to the
traditional interpretations. And quoting Augustine, a favorite father for
the Protestants, in the process. Not the best strategy, but probably the
only one available to him at the time.

Ted
Received on Mon May 22 14:20:10 2006