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Updated: June 29, 2025
It should be said that he was equally confident of the unreality of the Copernican hypothesis, on the ground that it was contrary to the tenets of the theologians and philosophers and to common-sense, and therefore subversive of the foundations of every science. Of his work on witchcraft, Mr.
It has been noted that neither on the first occasion, in 1616, nor on the second in 1633, did the reigning Pope sign the decrees concerning Galileo. The contention has accordingly been made that Paul V. and Urban VIII. are both alike vindicated from any technical responsibility for the attitude of the Romish Church towards the Copernican doctrines.
Immediately the Church condemned the statements of Copernicus and forbade Galileo to teach or discuss them. All books which affirmed the motion of the earth were forbidden, and to read the work of Copernicus was declared to risk damnation. All branches of the Protestant Church, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, vied with each other in denouncing the Copernican doctrine.
On the accession of a new Pope , Urban VIII., who had been his friend as Cardinal Barberini, Galileo, after eight years of silence, thought that he might now venture to publish his great work on the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, especially as the papal censor also had been his friend.
This is the principle of symmetry, more or less conscious applications of which can, no doubt, be found in various works and even in the conceptions of Copernican astronomers, but which was generalized and clearly enunciated for the first time by the late M. Curie.
No sect had been free from this superstition. Popes and priests had taught their followers to pray against the evil influences of comets and other celestial portents; Luther and Melanchthon had condemned in no measured terms the rashness and impiety of those who had striven to show that the heavenly bodies and the earth move in concordance with law those 'fools who wish to reverse the entire science of astronomy. A long interval had elapsed between the time when the Copernican theory was struggling for existence when, but that more serious heresies engaged men's attention and kept religious folk by the ears, that astronomical heresy would probably have been quenched in blood and the forging by Newton of the final link of the chain of reasoning on which modern astronomy is based; but in those times the minds of men moved more slowly than in ours.
Galileo, condemned by mathematicians and monks and cardinals, caricatured everywhere, yet waiting and watching with his telescope to see the coming up of stellar reenforcements, when the stars in their courses would fight for the Copernican system; then sitting down in complete blindness and deafness to wait for the coming on of the generations who would build his monument and bow at his grave.
It may possibly have been that Galileo himself had not felt quite confident in the soundness of the Copernican theory, prior to the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter.
In fact, the excellence of Copernicus's book helped to prolong the life of the epicyclical theories in opposition to Kepler's teaching. All of the best theories were compared by him with observation. These were the Ptolemaic, the Copernican, and the Tychonic.
At one time, the cry was, "If you hold that the earth moves round the sun, you deny the truth of the Bible." Popes, conclaves, and religious orders, rose up against the Copernican heresy. But, as Pascal said, they could not prevent the earth from moving, or themselves from moving along with it. One thing, however, they could do, and they did.
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