Early Modern Europe by Cameron Euan

Author:Cameron Euan [Euan, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195669442
Google: 8WaZPwAACAAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-01-23T16:46:58+00:00

clearly provoked by his own determination to force the issues, and it is hard to see how the theologians could have acted otherwise than they did without abandoning all their established principles. The condemnation was deliberately mild, requiring little more than a show of obedience. The much harsher treatment of 1632-3 followed an act of deliberate defiance, the publication of the Dialogue on the Two World Systems, which Pope Urban VIII not unreasonably believed to include open mockery of his own opinions.

Did the trial matter to anyone but the immediate protagonists? We know that Descartes was so alarmed at the news that he delayed publication of some of his work, but his friend Mersenne--a pious Minim friar--would soon go to great lengths to arrange the publication of Galileo's last and greatest work, the Discourses ( 1638). From the start many French Catholics seem to have seen the whole affair as another example of papal perversity, while there is little sign that French scientific thinking was inhibited. The situation in Spain, Italy, and the Austrian Habsburg lands was rather different, for here the Church usually had a firmer grip on the intellectual world, and Roman decisions were regarded with less suspicion. There was no sign of any general move to persecute individuals or groups for holding irregular scientific or philosophical opinions, so long as these were not proclaimed too loudly; on the other hand, free debate was inhibited, while all formal teaching remained very conservative. This might well have been the situation had Galileo never been tried, so perhaps he was right to force the issue, and mainly at fault because he fought his corner so ineptly in political terms. In the end the Catholic Church was left with an embarrassing ruling which it would take a ridiculously long time to rescind; it suffered a good deal of damage to its own credibility, while quite possibly advancing the theories it tried to condemn. There was certainly a serious temptation for Protestants to react by embracing the new philosophy just because the Vatican had condemned it.

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